Some of the cost is due to grift. But a lot of the cost is due to making sure that things work in harder conditions than office/home, that the parts can be rep

Some of the cost is due to grift. But a lot of the cost is due to making sure that things work in harder conditions than office/home, that the parts can be repaired quickly, etc. It also usually has to work for longer than typical lifespan targeted by server vendors (3-5 years for normal server, 20-30 years for industrial/military hw) All of those requirements also mean that there's less made, so you have less exploitation of economies of scale - even if you use COTS chips, the market for, let's say, OpenVPX SBCs with specific connector configuration is pretty small. So even efforts to commoditise parts run into problems like that.