[amluto]

Dell’s list prices have essentially nothing to do with the prices that any competent buyer would actually pay, especially when storage is involved. Look at the prices of Dell disks, which are nothing special compared to name brand disks of equal or better spec and much lower list price.

I don’t know what discount large buyers get, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s around 75%.

[hirako2000]

Agreed and the specs in the story in fact show they didn't provision add-ons such as specific SSDs from dell.

Still well over $1M for the cluster.. skeletons of racks with just CPUs and ram.