I would actually argue that much of high performance computing (which benefits hugely from advanced processor instructions like AVX and SSE) is just as fit if n

I would actually argue that much of high performance computing (which benefits hugely from advanced processor instructions like AVX and SSE) is just as fit if not more fit for cloud computing than a web backend. Much of HPC is for simulation related work which tends to be ad-hoc and bursty and generally speaking, is more horizontally distributable than web services (i.e. double the # of machines and simulation will run twice as fast). Thus a pool of shared resources (read: the cloud) is far more efficient (thus cheaper) than individual companies maintaining silo'ed compute resources.