I may be alone here, but the thought just can’t escape my mind. I’ve voiced this everywhere that I find it a bit troubling that the entire hosting world—for the most part—has consolidated to a few tech companies (Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure) and DigitalOcean to a small degree.

There was once a time when we bought our own hardware and rented rack space from a major data center company. Within just a little time, our brand-new hardware was obsolete, and we just kept needing to buy more and more.

I think that’s what has happened to so many major data center companies and hosting providers. They simply got killed trying to keep up with “cloud hosting.” People may forget, but for me it was just yesterday that Rackspace was the King of Kings. Now I don’t even know if they exist anymore.

My intuition tells me this isn’t a good thing, because the modern internet—and really so much of mobile apps—is built on the compute of just these companies. It makes things scary for outages. It’s like the modern Internet is built on sticks and scotch tape. A friend of mine called it a monopoly, but I think it’s more like it’s something to be concerned about. We already fear “big tech,” and now all the websites and mobile apps are hosted on AWS, GCP, and Azure? I think that makes us an easy target in many ways.

This is where Cloudflare comes in. They sit at the edge, but what if they decide they’re going to become the 4th major cloud provider? Maybe they are already?

Whatever the case, as we discuss the impact of AI and guardrails, perhaps we should also consider our consolidation of storage and compute from a national security perspective.

I think there will always be private data centers, private racks, and servers—but it has to be a marketing trend of shrinking and shrinking. We have a tricky situation we’ve found ourselves in. We’re now in an era where GPUs are more valuable than CPUs. We basically have two companies that make all the GPUs for the entire world. Hardware costs and precious metals are increasing because of the demand for computing, let alone storage.

When Apple started making their own CPUs, they blew me away. I couldn’t believe such small setups could blast through such huge, powerful programs.

Whatever— you may think of Elon, but he is in fact very much our modern-day Howard Hughes. How will he play into all of this? Is he going to destroy ISPs with Starlink and just destroy the data center topic by placing them in space? We’re in very, very interesting times. Unless war steps in, humanity is about to have a gigantic leap forward. The question is how long will each of these items take. Personally, in my 40s, I may just get a glimpse of it, but our children—and the babies being born as we speak—will know a world we can only see in a Hollywood movie.

I apologize that I jumped around a bit, but I wanted to display all the connections to each other.

In closing, I can only imagine what world we’ll be living in looks like in 2030. I hope it’s for the best. I hope we don’t end up in Terminator, or a hybrid Great Depression with social-security-like payments because AI took all the jobs. I’m a positive person, and I hope all roads lead to the right road. But as Julius Caesar said, “The die is cast.”