This happened a lot with Sun around that time; I bought 10 E450s for fun from one of the hosters who did exactly that and since then went bankrupt. Great, unbreakable machines.
Bubble dot-com companies rich with VC cash did the same thing. Built massively overprovisioned data centers with expensive Sun servers (because Sun == Internet at that time) and never actually had the traffic to justify even a fraction of it.
Kind of reminds me of when we heard a rumor than a rival ISP had bought a handful of Sun servers (in the year 2000). We thought they had tends of thousands of customers, figured they would be launching DSL, figured that had thousands of web hosting customers...
Turns out they got some weird grant so they spent the cash on those, otherwise they would have lost the money. They went out of business a year later and we kept chugging along with our Pentium III servers.