Because they'd operate at cost, which is wildly out of alignment with what the market will charge you for a CPU cycle. I'd bet that <10% of what you pay for an

Because they'd operate at cost, which is wildly out of alignment with what the market will charge you for a CPU cycle. I'd bet that <10% of what you pay for an EC2 instance is hardware acquisition and labor and electricity. The other 90 is in support of the never ending zero-sum game that is fighting over market share. Compare it to municipal internet, in which you usually pay less to get more because you can fire the marketing department.