[Cthulhu_]

I wonder if it might be because US datacenters are older and were not built to the same scales as newer datacenters.

I can also imagine that the local datacenters are just the equivalent of 'last mile', serving only that which needs to be handled directly, and data is passed asynchronously to the US for larger scale processing and analysis. Makes more sense if they have better (or cheaper) datacenter personnel in the US, or if things like equipment, electricity are cheaper over there.

[vasco]

For last mile they for sure have agreements with ISPs worldwide for collocated boxes similar to Netflix. These should just be hardcore compute.