[sgarland]

If your monthly cloud bill is < $100K, you don’t need $5MM worth of hardware. That cloud spend equates to, at best, a couple of beefy servers, which (modulo AI cards) could almost certainly be had for <= $50K/ea. So for $200K, you could have a two-zone setup.

Where it does make sense in the short-term for this scenario is the experience and knowledge necessary to reliably run your own servers. If you don’t have that, you may not want to invest the time and effort to do so. But on pure cost, unless your bill is on the order of a few thousand per month, cloud will never win. It can’t; they have to make money.