I remember reading a story about an email server that was limited to sending emails within 150 miles. Through a lot of digging, they found it was due to an auto-timeout timer getting reset to 0ms. Anything further than 150 miles would cause a 1ms delay and thus get rejected for taking too long.

For the majority of applications you need data centers for, latency just doesn’t matter. Bandwidth, storage space, and energy costs for example are all generally far more important.

need to be somewhat close to important population areas

They really don’t. I live in regional Australia - the nearest data center is 1300 miles away. It’s perfectly fine. I work in tech and we had a small data center (50 servers) in our office with a data center grade fibre link - got rid of it because it was a waste of money. Even comparing 1300 miles of latency to 20 feet of latency wasn’t worth it.

To be clear, having 0.1ms of latency was noticeable for some things. But nothing that really matters. And certainly not AI where you’re often waiting 5 seconds or even a full minute.

You can’t actually plop something out in the middle of BFE.

The number of data centers in Prineville/Hermiston/Umatilla/Boardman, OR beg to differ. Power is cheap due to the Bonneville dams and that trumps latency as they’re BFE as hell unless you live in Portland.

While latnecy matters sometimes, there’s still a lot of data center services that care a lot less and can be put anywhere.

The earth has a circumference of 25,000 miles, and the speed of light in a fiber cable is 124,000 miles per second, so going the whole way around the earth would take .2 seconds(assuming you could send a signal that far).