True, but there is so much value that we provide above and beyond just a cloud bill, that I think it is worth it. This is way more than racking and stacking commodity servers and providing a ssh login.

It is novel equipment that few have ever used before outside of a relatively small HPC community. It regularly breaks and has issues (bugs) that need industry relationships to manage properly. We've had one server down for over a month now cause SMCI can't get their sh/t together to fix it. That's a $250k+ 350lbs paperweight. Good luck to any other small company that wants to negotiate that relationship.

We are offering a very valuable service by enabling easy access to some of the most powerful compute available today. How many people do you think have a good grasp of what it takes to configure rocev2 & 8x400G across a cluster of servers? Good luck trying to hire talent that can set that up, they already have jobs.

The capex / opex / complexity involved with deploying this level of gear is huge and only getting larger as the industry shifts to bigger/better/faster (ie: air cooling is dead). Things are moving so quickly, that equipment you purchased a year ago is now already out of date (H100 -> H200 is a great example). You're going to have to have a pretty impressive depreciation model to deploy this yourself.

I wouldn't just dismiss this as moving costs around.