I also managed HPC data centers and I agree with you. I feel like the term data center is a key word there. There is a point of scaling where it's just cheape

I also managed HPC data centers and I agree with you. I feel like the term data center is a key word there. There is a point of scaling where it's just cheaper to manage a data center with a dedicated in house team. I think that holds true in other industries as well. As far as HPC goes specifically, we could get some of the financial numbers to make sense in the cloud (cpu intensive jobs), but couldn't make it work for others (data intensive jobs shipping PB's around on the reg) That and HPC has a lot of grant funding. It can be quite advantageous for an org to use an on prem data center almost like a slush fund. Can keep key projects running that would otherwise die when they are having a rough funding year.