[burntrelish1273]

Snap needs to have consistent booked revenue in order justify this sort of outlay.

This is akin to dot-com era companies signing long leases on buildings or small business owners buying lots of inventory. Plus, 2 gigadollars could easily buy 4-10 soup-to-nuts datacenters that have tangible (although less) resale value.

Overexpansion is easy to do and super risky... these sort of moves increase expectations and scare off wise investors.

[late2part]

Maybe. I agree with your sentiment, but a lot of investors say "cloud" - ooh good, I like Google, so Google Cloud must be good, buy Snap Stock!!!

[burntrelish1273]

Ideally, a company should use a hybrid of cloud and on-prem as a p&l dial to adjust risk and agility.

EDIT: for super scrappy startups playing with on-prem with lab-like reliability, https://unixsurplus.com/ is awesome.