Latency
The round-trip delay between a user and a facility, driven largely by fiber distance and the number of network hops.
Light in fiber travels roughly two-thirds the speed of light in vacuum, which sets a hard floor of about one millisecond of round trip per hundred kilometers of route — and real routes are never straight lines. Equipment and peering hops add more.
Latency is what separates workloads. Interactive services, trading and inference serving are latency-bound and must sit near population and peering. Model training and batch processing are not, which is why they can chase cheap power into remote basins.
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