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Speaking to Storj about its new model made me inquisitive about decentralized storage. On the one hand, there are components that would assist enhance its adoption. On the opposite, it additionally appears at odds with different traits, equivalent to sovereign clouds. Right here’s what I realized. — Anna

Slashing cloud payments

The amount of knowledge generated by firms appears to be ever-increasing, however issues about cloud prices are rising, too.

Earlier this month, we realized that AWS’ year-on-year income progress dropped into the mid-teens in January as clients sought to scale back their spending. “As we glance forward, we count on these optimization efforts will proceed to be a headwind to AWS progress in no less than the subsequent couple of quarters,” Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky mentioned in the course of the firm’s earnings name.

Whereas this preoccupation reignited the bare metal debate, it additionally creates tailwinds for one more choice: decentralized storage. Represented by gamers equivalent to Arweave, Filecoin, Internxt, Sia and Storj, it presents a less expensive various to hyperscalers.