Spatial Shifting: Routing Compute Across Geography
The sun is always setting somewhere, and power is always cheap somewhere. Spatial shifting moves work to where the grid is favorable instead of waiting for the local grid to improve. It is more powerful than temporal shifting because geography multiplies the options, and more dangerous because moving compute means moving or duplicating data, crossing latency budgets, and reasoning about wires you do not control. The prize is a fleet that behaves as one global machine, dispatching each job to the cleanest, cheapest, least-congested corner of the planet that can serve it. The tax is data gravity. The discipline is knowing which jobs are light enough to fly.
Knowledge check
What is data gravity, and why does it limit spatial workload shifting?
Show the answer
Data gravity is the tendency of compute to be pulled toward where large datasets already live, because moving or replicating big data across regions is slow, costly, and sometimes legally restricted. It limits spatial shifting because a job is only worth relocating if its data can follow cheaply enough that the power savings exceed the transfer and replication costs.