Think of it less as a subsidy. Instead, think of this— Team A is running a database and needs to buy disks with a certain amount of IO capacity. Team B is run

Think of it less as a subsidy. Instead, think of this— Team A is running a database and needs to buy disks with a certain amount of IO capacity. Team B is running YouTube and needs to store tons of data. You add up the IO + storage requirements from team A and the IO + storage requirements of team B and you buy disks capable of providing that combined amount of IO + storage. The resulting cost is much lower than the cost of buying disks for team A and disks for team B separately.