E-waste disposal is a huge cost, and it might be entirely possible you're not seeing the cost, or you're not aware of what a badly negotiated contract looks like.
Also, a lot of the industry runs on incredibly poor margins. The only datacenter space in the world right now printing money is either owned by clouds or owned by the AI bubble (which are sometimes the same companies, or the cloud leasing space to the AI bubble).
Mostly, profits are eaten by power deals (this is why Facebook put their biggest important DCs up where the cheapest power in the US is) or property ownership (buying land, building the DC, paying property taxes, maintaining the building, etc, that shit aint cheap), and then you get to buy hardware and hopefully get customers.
Amazon, Google, Facebook, et al all cheat their way through every loophole known to man to keep the costs down and the profit high; not a lot of it is from scale, even though they're still trying to chase that to the end, too.
Also, a lot of the industry runs on incredibly poor margins. The only datacenter space in the world right now printing money is either owned by clouds or owned by the AI bubble (which are sometimes the same companies, or the cloud leasing space to the AI bubble).
Mostly, profits are eaten by power deals (this is why Facebook put their biggest important DCs up where the cheapest power in the US is) or property ownership (buying land, building the DC, paying property taxes, maintaining the building, etc, that shit aint cheap), and then you get to buy hardware and hopefully get customers.
Amazon, Google, Facebook, et al all cheat their way through every loophole known to man to keep the costs down and the profit high; not a lot of it is from scale, even though they're still trying to chase that to the end, too.