Why distributed cloud infrastructure is moving toward decentralization

The distributed cloud network industry is a big business globally.  However, it is set to continue smashing growth records in the next few years.  Depending on the source, the distributed cloud market is set to exceed 17 billion by 2035, with more aggressive estimates suggesting we will hit that milestone by 2028.  This means that the market, already boasting strong double digit growth each year, will continue to boom.

This is great for those companies involved, and for the tech industry as a whole.  That said, it’s not enough to take these numbers at face value.  Yes, by all accounts the industry will continue an upward trajectory.  But we can gain some very critical insight if we understand what is creating all this demand and how that demand might evolve over time.  Further still, if we want the full picture of this market’s future, we need to understand not only the demand but the supply side.  This is especially important once you realize that our supply for compute hardware is not infinite, and isn’t as scalable as it has been up to this point.

Let’s dive into both the demand and supply for computer services in general, discussing the reasons for distributed clouds as a major factor.  Then let’s consider the likely evolution of distributed clouds into decentralized distributed clouds: what it means, why it makes sense, and the challenges ahead.  We even have an early example of this evolution with the engineering trial of Salad and Golem Network, two major players in the market.

Let’s be clear:  The real market we need to discuss isn’t distributed cloud networks; it’s computing in general.  People don’t really care where their computing power comes from.  They need it to be fast enough, secure enough, and cheap enough.  After it meets whatever thresholds customers have, computing is a commodity.  The obvious reason that distributed clouds have jumped in popularity is their major scalability, both in capacity and cost.  Except for rare cases, someone who requires computing resources more than what their laptop offers is not going to invest in a rack of GPUs.  The much more likely path is to find a distributed cloud network that can handle their three concerns: performance (this includes speed, latency, uptime, and other measures), cost, and security.  Performance is relatively straightforward, because the network can either support you as promised or it can’t, in which case you switch providers.  In terms of cost, this too is straightforward and beats the cost of buying your own hardware nearly every time.  Cost is also critical because most clouds offer pricing as a pay-as-you go.  There is no need to buy, maintain, repair, or upgrade computing hardware.  Finally, security is generally good for major cloud providers simply because breaches make the news, and reputation is everything for cloud providers who claim to offer a quality service.  Unless the computing is highly classified, most cloud providers can offer the right level of security.

So what is causing this rise in demand for computing?  The obvious answer is AI, and that is certainly a very large factor.  However, it’s more than that.  If AI didn’t exist, the simple growth of data availability, connectivity, larger file sizes as media quality grows–all of that adds up.  Take all of this and include the fact that AI can use all of this data to become even more effective, and it becomes easy to see why the demand has continued to spike.  If we take the trend of AI and project the next 5-10 years, it shows no sign of stopping, and its growing ability to connect more and more data sources means that computing power will be one of the largest industries globally.

As simple as the demand is, the supply side is a bit more complicated.  Without diving into an economic lesson on supply and demand, there are a number of factors that could mess up the supply of computing overall.  If you needed to replace your laptop, you could go to any number of stores and get one.  However, we are talking about a spike in global demand, and one that could very well exceed the world’s ability to meet it fast enough.  Add to this the issues of finite resources such as rare earth metals, countries not playing nice with each other by having trade wars, and this supply of infinite computing hardware isn’t realistic.  What’s the result?  Well, if the demand outstrips the supply, the supply will become more expensive.  Instead of having cheap cloud services, prices rise until only those services that are still making companies money will be worth paying for.

However, this is where the move toward decentralization comes into play.  While distributed cloud infrastructure can utilize hardware from many different users, and can take advantage of idle computing power, it won’t be enough.  Computing has become a global industry, and the solution must also be global.  This means that the computing infrastructure must be “borderless.”

What does borderless computing supply look like?  It doesn’t look like the standard distributed cloud networks, even though they are likely pulling computing from multiple countries.  No, truly borderless computing supply means decentralization.  Why?  Because three factors will limit traditional distributed cloud services:  payments, censorship, and security.

As mentioned above, the engineering trial between Salad.com (a key player in the GPU cloud platform industry) and Golem Network (one of the first decentralized computing protocols) seeks to explore what truly decentralized distributed cloud infrastructure should look like.  The goal is to use digital currency for payment instead of volunteers or gift cards.  This creates a proper market that doesn’t rely on any country’s currency.  Likewise, using smart contract management takes away the ability for any government to raid an office and censor content, insulating from interference and allowing people from around the globe to participate.  Finally, the strong security on the cloud itself, combined with a lack of centralized teams, creates better security than you can offer with centralized platforms (where humans are often the weak link).

Combined, Salad and Golem have one of the largest distributed networks in the world – rivalling the strongest supercomputers in existence.https://t.co/WKYO4K7a08

— Salad (@Salad_Chefs) January 26, 2026

It will be interesting to see the role that decentralization will play in the years ahead as the world struggles to keep computing supply in pace with demand.  There will undoubtedly be lessons learned and setbacks, but great innovations and improvements as well.  The bottom line is that we will continue to have a strong global appetite for computing power, and the decentralized, distributed cloud infrastructure is a strong model to keep it fed.

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