The cloud business model is to use scale and customer ownership to crush hardware margins to dust. They’re also building their own accelerators to try to cut Nvidia out altogether.
I've always felt that the business model is nickel & diming for things like storage/bandwidth and locking in customers with value-add black box services that you can't easily replace with open source solutions.
Just took a random server: https://instances.vantage.sh/aws/ec2/m5d.8xlarge?duration=mo... - to get a decent price on it you need to commit to three years at $570 per month(no storage or bandwidth included). Over the course of 3 years that's $20520 for a server that's ~10K to buy outright, and even with colo costs over the same time frame you'll spend a lot less, so not exactly crushing those margins to dust.
Section 179 allows immediate expensing of equipment including computers, but is limited to $1.25M/yr. That’s enough for many small and medium businesses.
