Ranelagh is a prosperous suburb in southern Dublin full of pleasant pubs and trendy restaurants with names like Butcher Grill and Firebyrd. Victorian villas contain foreign embassies, while the smaller brick houses with white window frames are frequently occupied by employees of Google, IBM and Meta – whose headquarters are only a few minutes away.

Sergey N. lives in one of these homes, a 35-year-old who seems younger than his age when he opens the door. Sergey N.’s commute is manageable, with less than a 30-minute drive to Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon subsidiary with $80 billion in annual revenues that is the world’s largest provider of cloud computing. Many of the largest companies in the world store their information, and even much of their IT needs, with AWS, including Netflix, Vodafone, NASA, the U.S. Navy and most of the companies listed on Germany’s blue-chip sto