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The most expensive AI stuff is the least latency sensitive. A coding agent could be on a different continent and you wouldn't really notice.

AI results are generally easy to transport - just a few bytes over some fibre. Electric is harder to ship, there is only so much you can put in a wire (even high voltage DC). Widgets (car parts...) are even harder to ship and take longer which is why big things often get final assembly locally.

Why would anybody outside of tech care if the cost of AI goes up?

Honestly would be kind of cool if a locality actually had that much power. It could lead to an enclave of people who still value thinking for themselves. In practice I doubt bigcorps would turn down the customers.

Lol the corpos having too much power over consumers is because the local residents wont submit? You assume the company cant charge higher anyway out of the goodness of their hearts?

This is what unregulated capitalism looks like with no govt oversight.