Datacenter proxy
A datacenter proxy routes your request through an IP announced by a cloud provider or data center operator — AWS, GCP, Azure, or similar. Fast and cheap, but the ASN is trivially classifiable as non-consumer.
Definition
A datacenter proxy routes your request through an IP announced by a cloud provider (AWS, GCP, Azure) or a datacenter operator. The ASN is the tell: at the network layer, any target can look up the origin IP and see that it's cloud-originated rather than from a consumer ISP.
Why datacenter is the default for most AI workloads
Contrary to the common affiliate-listicle framing ("residential for everything"), datacenter is the right class for the majority of AI training corpus collection by volume. The open-web sources that make up most training corpora — arXiv, GitHub, Wikimedia, Common Crawl, HuggingFace, most academic mirrors — tolerate cloud-origin traffic because it's the expected use case.
Datacenter specifically wins on:
- Cost — sub-$0.10/GB on committed tiers vs. $2-8/GB residential
- Speed — sub-10ms added latency vs. 50-200ms on residential
- Throughput — line-rate to source mirrors (especially AWS S3 requester-pays buckets like Common Crawl and arXiv)
When datacenter fails
Targets that filter aggressively on cloud ASN:
- Regional news sites (often geoblock AWS / GCP / Azure)
- Some government portals
- Consumer web properties (retail, social, anti-bot-heavy)
- Some academic mirrors behind Cloudflare
Running datacenter against those targets produces silent content gaps — you get a response but the content is degraded or empty.
The routing matrix
Typical split for a well-shaped AI pipeline: ~80% datacenter, ~15% residential (for geoblock-sensitive sources), ~5% ISP (for session-sensitive sources). The routing matrix post covers the per-source decision framework.
Related
Related terms
ASN targeting
ASN targeting is a proxy-routing feature that lets you select exits announced by a specific Autonomous System Number — typically to match a ...
ISP proxy
An ISP proxy (sometimes "static residential") is a datacenter- hosted IP address that announces under a residential ISP's ASN. It combines d...
Residential proxy
A residential proxy routes your request through a real home internet connection — an IP address assigned by an ISP to a consumer subscriber....
Rotating proxy
A rotating proxy assigns a different exit IP to each outgoing request (or at a fixed time interval), distributing the traffic across a pool....
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