My experience is in cloud and I can give some insight on what we were thinking at this time. In cloud, infrastructure is key and our theory was that we needed to beat the other companies in terms of scale and capability. So we were aggressively trying to scale to get ahead of the competition. The environment was highly competitive all the way down to even the PCBA manufacturers. As an example, at one company, to get their "A teams" you need to be their top customer in terms of volume.
So while it looks odd by comparison, cloud providers were in a bit of a different environment than Apple.
So while it looks odd by comparison, cloud providers were in a bit of a different environment than Apple.