How many active nodes would Subspace need to someday be viable at an AWS level?

Question from SB123#3585 on Discord:

Mathematically, how many nodes would Subspace really need active to someday be viable at an AWS level?

The AWS math is difficult. It’s important to know that not all storage is built the same - some is meant to have hyper fast retrievability and some is okay to stay in a cold storage where you set it and forget it. At the earliest stages Subspace storage will be closer to the latter, which is better suited for blockchain archival storage and even NFT metadata. As far as total storage capacity, I don’t know the AWS numbers. But we see no reason not to host 100,000+ farmer nodes with several hundred GB each. As a distributed storage network at that capacity we should have few obstacles to what data the network can store.