Yes, it's quite obvious when you actually have compute needs. At my current employer, we spent about 100k to build a small single purpose hpc. One year later, I calculated the azure costs (help bargain for more servers) would have been around 1.5m. This is almost 24/7 use though, and add another ~150k in electricity.
For my own company we built out at two regionally distinct colo facilities. That worked really well and operations was efficient and costs were moderate, clearly tied to CAPEX increments which were predictable.
Recent projects have been on AWS. For a project that is roughly on the scale of our colo in terms of instances, though with aggregate lower performance, we are buying one of our colos every year. It’s insane. Network costs are particularly egregious in AWS.
But there is absolutely no way we’d be permitted to build colo facilities for many reasons and there are many reasons why even if we could get permission to do so we would choose not to due the resulting death by a thousand cuts orchestrated by the team who happens to have inserted themselves as the owner for DC/colo like things.
Yes, cloud costs are the cost of having poor internal management, such that inefficiency and incompetence reigns unchallenged. The enormous cost differential is unfortunately borne by the unit doing the work, rather than the one preventing it from being done efficiently.
