Why exactly do we need data centers? This might be a stupid question, I know little about hardware

This community tends to criticize Ethereum for running on AWS. But isn’t the solution to this that all nodes are running at some independent location instead of just being in a few different data centers?

I generally lack basic knowledge of how data centers even work. It would be great if someone could help me to understand that. How much does infrastructure like that improve the performance of a subnet? How difficult/impossible is it to build the most crucial parts of such infrastructure from scratch at an independent location? I see that data centers make a lot of sense for AWS but the point with Blockchains is that nobody alone can mess with them. So is there any way we can go around putting many nodes into the same room, which seems to defeat that purpose? While I really like the vision of a world computer, I do think it’s totally fine if the ICP is much more expensive to use than AWS if that allows us to have a more decentralized system. I’m trying to understand to what extent we can do that tradeoff. It feels like the IC works perfectly for social apps but personally, I would not want to build a DeFi app on it right now.

I also have 0 clues about what secure enclaves are but it seems hard to imagine how someone cannot mess with a computer when they have physical access to it.

Is my understanding correct that a node is supposed to belong to an independent entity and not the data center itself? If that is the case, is the idea that a legal contract between the node owner and the data center prevents the data center from messing with the node? I’m not entirely convinced this would work…

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Until AWS ban it for whatever shit reasons

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