The upside is that these folks are extremely, extremely space-and-power constrained. Cloud data centers cycle through hardware much faster than any other indus

The upside is that these folks are extremely, extremely space-and-power constrained. Cloud data centers cycle through hardware much faster than any other industry (enterprise users, engineering workstations, render farms, etc) and when they're done with it they dump it on ebay for pennies. If you look at the large-volume sellers of rackmount servers on ebay, you'll notice that there are one or two near each major data center cluster. The best part is that they really do not care at all about any kind of cost recovery, so they dump truckloads of this stuff all at once and tank the price. If you can afford to wait you can get some utterly amazing deals on five-year-old top-of-the-line gear. If you buy enough to justify freight the (amortized) shipping is really cheap too.