There are other considerations beyond a simple cost per minute average here: * Uptime guarantees - AWS goes down. Running your own hardware locally, you at lea

There are other considerations beyond a simple cost per minute average here: * Uptime guarantees - AWS goes down. Running your own hardware locally, you at least have a recourse. * Storage and bandwidth - some of these datasets are huge and not amenable to streaming onto a temporary rental. * Security - the ever-present bogeyman of cloud services. It might be harder to lock down your own machines, but it's the only way to fulfill some contractual requirements. For commodity processing that doesn't involve these specialties, sure, fire away. That's what it's good at, and what most people need most of the time. But there's always a final TCO number and arriving at it requires accounting for all the risks.