Most organisations never come across a problem that requires neatly clustered high-end hardware. "[T]he IBM Telum II processors are eight cores running at 5.5G

Most organisations never come across a problem that requires neatly clustered high-end hardware. "[T]he IBM Telum II processors are eight cores running at 5.5GHz and with a 360MB virtual L3 cache and 2.88GB virtual L4 cache. Telum II brings a new data processing unit, I/O advancements, and other features to help accelerate AI workloads." But if you do, if you actually have such massive data streams and low tolerance for latencies that sharding them over many machines costs a lot in overhead and throughput slows down intolerably at load peaks, then these machines are most likely a bargain. They allow you to do things very few other can do, resulting in a moat around your business and locks you in with IBM. Or you've been around since the seventies and your software largely consists of COBOL, Fortran and assembly for this line of architectures, and it would cost you two decades of the great rewrite while all your developers do very little else, then it's also a bargain to be able to stay in business.