Decentralized AI vs Big Tech: Cocoon and NEAR Just Broke the Cloud Monopoly

This episode exposes the most important shift in AI infrastructure in years. Telegram’s Cocoon and the NEAR Foundation’s AI Cloud use decentralized confidential computing to run AI models without revealing your data to Amazon, Microsoft, or Google.

These networks keep every request sealed inside hardware enclaves. GPU providers earn tokens for compute but never see the workloads. Platform operators cannot harvest your behavior or build identity profiles. This is what real digital sovereignty looks like.

We break down how Cocoon uses the TON blockchain, how NEAR AI Cloud delivers hardware-level attestation, and why this threatens the core surveillance-and-lock-in model of the cloud oligopoly.

If decentralized AI gains momentum, Big Tech’s grip on inference markets is finished. This is the quiet revolution happening outside the cloud.