With petabytes you should either have a procurement team that gets a great deal or you should look at co-location. At some point, hiring a team of infrastructur

With petabytes you should either have a procurement team that gets a great deal or you should look at co-location. At some point, hiring a team of infrastructure experts is the cheap option, esp if you leave hardware management with data center providers. And it's not mutually exclusive. I've seen companies working very cost efficiently by using dedicated hardware for 99% of the workload and AWS or GCP for any experiments where they wanted to try out new features.