We specifically colo GPU hardware due to how expensive it is. For instance this year we spent ~$500k (rough estimate) on purchasing GPU hardware. With cloud th

We specifically colo GPU hardware due to how expensive it is. For instance this year we spent ~$500k (rough estimate) on purchasing GPU hardware. With cloud that would have costed us ~$80k/mo - so after ~6 months we break even on the hardware and then after that just have to spend the much smaller colo bill. We expect hardware to last us 3+ years so we come out far ahead by buying. Our work is so specialized anyways that if we went cloud we would still have to have the same dev ops staff anyways so there is not much cost difference on that side of things. We had to invest a little bit more upfront in deployment, but in the end it is peanuts compared to the $80k/mo that we are saving in cloud costs. The only trouble is when we need to scale beyond our currently owned hardware. In that case, once we are above capacity of servers we own, we make another purchase and in the interim use cloud to bridge the gap. In the end purchasing hardware ourselves is one of the highest ROI moves we have made and I would highly recommend it to others. Of course if your cloud bill is much lower you might find the cost savings to not be enough to be worth the hassle.