

We’ll have to see how it turns out, but there are many more problems with spreading them out. You need more employees, more land, more contracts to build and with power companies. Also, spreading out the datacenters will avoid concetrating the harmful effects in a specific place, usually poorer communities that are ignored by regulations often.
I think the most likely outcome is people moving away from New York entirely. Its already difficult with the higher costs of labor and regulations, so this may be a final nail in the coffin. Data centers aren’t a great asset to have in your community, as it drains resources and has a low economic impact to help improve the local’s resources.

ARM is a RISC ISA, which should make it way easier to emulate/statically compile. The main difficulties wouldn’t be hardware quirks like a lot of past emulators, but system OS quirks. The wine project has dealt with a lot of both (x86 has a ton of instructions and windows has a lot of system shit going on).
I do think you are 100% correct that hardware is much simpler now. The Switch has had several emulators for a while now bc of this.