It would cost an arm and a leg... it would be interesting to run the calculation though. There are a lot of bottlenecks in running a render farm like that, but

It would cost an arm and a leg... it would be interesting to run the calculation though. There are a lot of bottlenecks in running a render farm like that, but one of them is just moving the data around. A typical scene uses upwards of 1TB of data (textures, etc) and every scene has a different set of data. So there is a lot of local caching on a fast SAN. Since the cost of hardware is amortized over many simultaneous productions and the farm runs at pretty close to 100% 24/7, I think the hardware investment is paid for quickly.