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

Reduce cloud bills

The amount of data generated by businesses seems to be growing, but so are concerns about cloud costs.

Earlier this month, we found out that AWS’s year-over-year revenue growth dipped into the mid-teens in January as customers tried to reduce their spending. “Looking forward, we expect these optimization efforts to continue to be a headwind to AWS growth for at least the next few quarters,” Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky said during the company’s earnings call.

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