the biggest practical advantage to renewable energy is that we can produce it ourselves and become independent of crises that happen in another part of the world. for example the iran war.
for digital infrastructure, it’s the same. if facebook changes their policy to surveill all citizens in a new way, that creates a shock for everyone else. if we can self-host our services, then we become independent. so it’s like solar-panels in the back yard, but for digital infrastructure.
True! Some level of distribution is essential for the resilience and doesn’t eat too much of efficiency.
In fact, I’ve been contemplating on the possibility of small, neighborhood data centers. They could both reliably provide local information services, as well as on-demand computing power.