To me it makes total sense for something like Gitlab to do their own HW, since it's really their core business. Sure, there's no point for say, target.com to us

To me it makes total sense for something like Gitlab to do their own HW, since it's really their core business. Sure, there's no point for say, target.com to use their own servers - computers is not really what they do, and cloud helps them keep expensive programmers and sysadmins to a minimum. But Gitlab is a whole different story.