You can buy a server from Dell with 1.5 TB of RAM and four beefy processors (80 cores) for about $60K. You can power and cool it for a year for maybe $4K.
Every time I look at AWS, it just doesn't make sense from a financial standpoint (even after you add another machine for redundancy, and remote hands -- you're ahead after 12 months).
I'm sure there are companies that will run this instance type 24/7 for years. But you can also spin one up for a short period of time, use it to do things you would normally need to do across a bunch of machines and then tear it down.
Having this type of instance available via an API call is within seconds is really cool.
Every time I look at AWS, it just doesn't make sense from a financial standpoint (even after you add another machine for redundancy, and remote hands -- you're ahead after 12 months).