[bakhy]

Apart from what other commenters already said about the cost of software complexity, is there a variant of Amdahl's law that could be used here? 10x 100 GB servers working on a problem together will probably never be 10x faster than 1x 100 GB server. Perhaps just the increase in the order of magnitude of the distance information needs to travel is already sufficient to set some higher bounds... So you may need to buy more than 10 of them to match 1x 1 TB server.

[threeseed]

But you're assuming that memory is the only thing that matters here.

10x100GB will have 10x the computing power of 1x1TB server.

[bakhy]

Ah, yes. Thank you!

Although, that means the 10x setup must cost much more. I think the idea in the comments above was taking 10 cheaper, weaker servers and somehow coming out with roughly the same price...

Well, in any case, things just got too complicated :)