Decentralized storage: Tailwinds and open questions

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Talking to Storj about its new version made me curious about decentralized storage. On the one hand, there are factors that could help boost its adoption. On the other, it also seems at odds with other trends, such as sovereign clouds. Here’s what I learned. — Anna

Slashing cloud bills

The volume of data generated by companies seems to be ever-increasing, but concerns about cloud costs are rising, too.

Earlier this month, we learned that AWS’ year-on-year revenue growth dropped into the mid-teens in January as customers sought to reduce their spending. “As we look ahead, we expect these optimization efforts will continue to be a headwind to AWS growth in at least the next couple of quarters,” Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky said during the company’s earnings call.

While this preoccupation reignited the bare metal debate, it also creates tailwinds for another option: decentralized storage. Represented by players such as Arweave, Filecoin, Internxt, Sia and Storj, it offers a cheaper alternative to hyperscalers.