This reminds me of when my consulting company was looking for cheap servers back in 2004 to host client projects. We found an eBay listing for about 80 machines

This reminds me of when my consulting company was looking for cheap servers back in 2004 to host client projects. We found an eBay listing for about 80 machines (if memory serves) that were being sold off at a pretty good price and had really good specs. They had been used to do the rendering for the SFX on The Chronicles of Riddick. We spent a few days trying to figure out how we could manage to buy the cluster and perhaps sell them to friends, etc and it just didn't work out. But that combined with talking about servers with a friend who had been a sysadmin on the VegieTales crew (then Pixar then Dreamworks) and the challenges they faced scaling up for projects meant it sparked the thought at the time that there's probably a nice market for running a rendering utility. And that's where the thought ended! Interesting to see if up and running now and benefiting smaller studios!