Chamath: Achieving 99.999% cloud reliability costs hundreds of billions
Chamath Palihapitiya · The Fight Over Open Source AI, Anthropic's $1.5B Payout, NYC Socialists: Evictions = Violence? · Jul 24, 2026 · at 1:15:37
Chamath Palihapitiya explains the extreme capital barrier to entry preventing companies like Apple from easily competing as cloud service providers.
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“Getting to the first two nines, you know, 99% uptime, if you're Hosting something for a pharma company or a defense company, you can probably do it for relatively cheaply. Getting to the third nine, 99.9 probably costs you in the billions. Getting to the fourth nine costs the tens of billions, but getting to that fifth nine costs hundreds of billions, and that takes a real investment and real technical skill. And there's only three games in town.”
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