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I’d be very surprised if that were even close to the average cost of a cloud datacenter server. Wouldn’t they be optimized for physical density and power efficiency (which is to say, maxed out CPU/RAM)?

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Interested to know more about this. I don’t think much public information is out there, but a quick Google revealed Snap signed a five year $2B contract with G back in 2017, and that’s just one major customer.

if those were equipment dedicated to brute-forcing I would expect it to be ASICs/FPGAs rather than typical servers. You'd get orders of magnitude faster solution[0]. At the expense of flexibility of course since those chips would be single purpose.

[0] For a very simple example compare the hashrate on any CPU vs a bitcoin miner ASIC with a comparable size.

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