[silverspoonin]

Climate change is having and will continue to have significant effects on our physical infrastructure, especially in the coastal areas, areas prone to flooding/drought, and wildfires.

But I don't see data centers/internet/power being an issue. Data centers are already globally distributed and load-balanced. Internet is near-ubiquitous, with growing wired, wireless & even satellite options. Power generation from renewables, along with storage, have been growing at an accelerated pace even despite (or some say because) the pandemic.

Also, an off-grid solution is very feasible: I can easily imagine a near future where I have my "smart home" running on a local Alpaca instance, being powered by my solar roof.

[CatWChainsaw]

Global distribution and load balancing exist yet we still need DownDetector. One of the reasons data centers go down is because of weather. Picture Cascadia devastating the west coast while a category 5 hurricane pummels the east coast.

Renewables aren't the panacea so many people want them to be.

I can't imagine that near future because despite the feasibility, the companies that manufacture smart home products want people in their thrall. Why go for a one-and-done purchase when that ubiquitous Internet can be used to hold basic functionality hostage for a recurring fee?

[silverspoonin]

Most outages nowadays are caused by misconfigurations or hacking, not individual data centers going down. Think Azure, AWS, etc.

Renewables aren't a panacea, but they exist now and are seeing growing deployment, even without "fuel sources becoming less plentiful". Too late to prevent climate change, but definitely early enough to prevent widespread power scarcity.

Oh, companies will definitely try, and many people will go along with it. But, people who care will continue to maintain self-hosted projects e.g. Home Assistant. Hardware can be jailbroken, and/or small manufacturers will be willing to charge a premium for open/hackable versions. Worst case, many "smart" items can be cobbled together from Raspberry Pi/ESP32/ESP8266.