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Yeah, using significantly cheaper but just somewhat slower hardware works great if you can parallelize.

Also cutting edge is usually very power hungry and power/cooling costs are majority of your expenses at data center scale.

They are doing 400Gbps per box already [1], they have 800Gbps Network card waiting to be tested, with PCI-E 6.0 they could do 1.6Tbps, assuming they somehow figure out how to overcome CPU and Memory bottleneck. Sapphire Rapids with HBM3 would give 2TB/s :)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28584738

They are very squeezed on rack space budget in at least some locations.

>Unless they're really squeezed on power or rack space budget

I think this is the case for their open connect appliances (or whatever they call them). They want to try to maximize throughput on a single device so they don't have to colocate so much equipment