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Jeff Bezos said the quiet part out loud — hopes that you'll give up your PC to rent one from the cloud
(www.windowscentral.com)
this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2026
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I mean, that's absolutely where this is going at a business level. Cloud computing has been in the cards for decades, and the only real question is who will do the hosting.
With the price of RAM and CPUs going asymptotic, these big cloud compute companies are building an effective monopoly on high end processing capacity. They're cornering the market on hardware. Eventually, you either use their computers or you stick with legacy hardware (that's seeded with Planned Obsolescence time bombs) or you (shudders just to think of it) start buying computers from CHINA.
When you think about it, there's really only one option.
Who? Me! Self hosting is a thing.
From an IT operations perspective this makes so much sense they’ve already tried it before. They were called “thin clients” and just had enough compute and network to connect to run remote desktop software.
This greatly reduces the amount of spending you need to build out a large corporate network, and centralizes management just like they already do for servers with stuff like VMWare.
Eh, depends. The price for something like VMware horizon was already damn expensive and that's before you got to citrix prices (and this is pre broadcom takeover.)
For some places the costs are able to be recouped but it really depends. You still need plenty of scale to have that be viable IME.
My main point being there are a millions of small businesses and medium size ones that are still always going to be far better off with normal physical hardware.
I'm assuming privacy isn't an issue and they don't mind Amazon picking the winners in business.
Privacy doesn’t exist on corporate networks, so they don’t. However, the early thin clients had local servers. I don’t know how the very largest companies would feel about giving Amazon that much power.
The largest companies already host everything on the cloud.
The largest companies are the cloud.
I hope China keeps manufacturing affordable computers and doesn't go all in on the cloud too. There might be profit in selling computers, but I bet there are politicians in the CCP who would love to have everyone rent cloud computing that's more easily watched and controlled.
The Chinese government doesn't want to have to deal with routing the world's email spam through their domestic servers. Nevermind the nightmare of latency going round trip from a terminal in Sao Paulo to a data center in Beijing, just so some mid-level bureaucrat can know the porn habits of Brazil.
I would say the bigger threat of Chinese hardware is an end to the effective technology embargo the US sanctions regime has imposed on the Global South. Far scarier to Americans than a Chinese bureaucrat with access to the Amazon web store history is a Cuban Communist with a standard of living that outpaces their Miami peers.
I was thinking more that they'd like the idea of better surveillance of their own population. If that happened there might be an incentive for them not to make it affordable to own capable hardware.
But if you're right about what you just said and China of all places ends up democratizing tech around the world, that will be something of a silver lining.