> Think of data centers as huge mainframes and we will soon come close.

I... kinda doubt it. All of the really big players have access to markets that are willing to pay huge margins.

there are a lot of smaller players that would be happy to sell you compute at 75% the price of amazon, and bandwidth at 1/10th the price of amazon. Yeah, the big customers are happy paying the premium, but there are plenty of small customers that will buy service from a smaller player if it means a big discount.

It's going to be increasingly difficult to compete with the big players' economies of scale though. There's a reason we don't buy cars from the neighbor's factory or generate our own electricity these days.

like... half the people I know who own a single family home generate a good portion of their own electricity.

Sometimes centralization helps efficiency, it's true, but sometimes the opposite, decentralization helps, too... it sure looks like for peak-load in sunny areas, decentralized power generation is cheaper.

I think that for commodity compute, the big players are not a lot more efficient than the big hardware manufacturers. Go to a supermicro, a foxcon, or other ODM server manufacturer, and you'd be surprised how cheap it is to buy actual hardware.

Small companies will scrap for margins that the big players, so far, at least, have laughed at, because so far, most of the market seems to be okay paying these large margins. (I used to be one of those small companies scrapping for those low margins; I am not happily and much more renumeratively employed by a big player, outside of their cloud department)

I personally think that long term, smaller players or in-house hosting will be the way to go for your 'base load' compute resource. I think that paying the margins of the big players makes a lot more sense for your 'peak load'

But, of course, we don't know yet; none of this will shake out until the next serious economic downturn. There isn't a lot of pressure to save money when the economy looks like this.