They are, but their costs also scale somewhat linearly (ie. for CPU core-based licensing, 10x the cores means ~10x the cost, give or take a little based on the

They are, but their costs also scale somewhat linearly (ie. for CPU core-based licensing, 10x the cores means ~10x the cost, give or take a little based on the vendor discount). At some point, it makes having an engineering team working on a custom solution the cheaper option: why pay vendor X $n$ millions of dollars per year when you could have $n \times 4$ engineers working on a system that's perfectly adapted to your needs? That being said, there is definitely a large amount of NIH promotion-ware being developed at large tech companies, as you mention.