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> enter a co-op model where you're still effectively renting access to hardware that you don't directly own

If we're imagining a co-op, then the participants should all be equal owners in an organisation that owns the hardware itself, otherwise it's not much of a co-op really.

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But at that point you don't have the same sort of security guarantees about the hardware. This isn't like a farming co-op where a single expensive piece of equipment gets passed around to each participant one week at a time. There needs to be either an economic, security, or other advantage to entering into this arrangement for a medium to large sized player that would otherwise be colocating multiple racks in a privately owned datacenter or else renting bare metal instances in bulk from one of the hyperscalers.

Participants as equal owners doesn't preclude security guarantees.

The advantage is having a voice in setting direction, investment and ultimate shared incremental profit recovery over the rent capture from hyperscalers.

It's an interesting idea really. But it also comes with cooperation, which means trust, and a lot of for-profit enterprises are bad at operating cooperatively outside of 2- or 3- way engagements.

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