In 2001 a freight train caught fire in a Baltimore tunnel and burned the fiber-optic cables inside, slowing the web as far away as Atlanta and Los Angeles.
In 2001 a train derailed and caught fire in a Baltimore tunnel, where temperatures reached 1,000 to 1,500 degrees and burned the cables running through it. Traffic from several internet providers was packed into that one passage, and web speeds in Atlanta and Los Angeles crawled.
The author points out that cloud providers, undersea cables and a handful of companies hold the internet together far more centrally than we imagine. AI has now dragged the data centres, chips and supply chains behind the cloud into plain view.
What stayed with me is simple: we say we put things in the cloud, but they have always been lying in the ground.
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