> But that can't be disk I/O, so that would leave networking? Networking is a huge part of cloud applications, and network connections take orders of magnitude

> But that can't be disk I/O, so that would leave networking? Networking is a huge part of cloud applications, and network connections take orders of magnitude longer to go through than disk access. There are components of any cloud architecture which are dedicated exclusively to handling networking. Reverse proxies, ingress controllers, API gateways, message broker handlers, etc etc etc. Even function-as-a-service tasks heavily favour listening and reacting to network calls. I dare say that pure horsepower servers are no longer driving demand for servers. The ability to shove as many processes and threads on a single CPU is by far the thing that cloud providers and on prem companies seek.