If the revenue is there, it’s a no brainer to build out your own data center or acquire prebuilt space. Cloud provider margins become your cost savings (clearly, as evidenced by this article). You’re going to need infrastructure people regardless, whether it’s on-prem expertise or AWS/Azure.

It’s disingenuous to inflate the compensation for datacenter employees as a boogie man, or to wave away a “modern cloud DC” as a Herculean undertaking. There rarely is any R&D required, and stock compensation isn’t always necessary.