At my last job, we had servers with 64 cores, 1TB ram, and 100+ TB of storage that were taxed to their full extent by one or two people at a time. The job was essentially taking multi terabyte datasets and matching, filtering, and mutating them based on some customer requirements.
Those servers cost a ton of cash, and we had a handful of them. I could easily see my workflow being improved and maybe even money being saved if that much horsepower was given locally to the few who used it most. But the server model also worked fine.
Personally, I have a monstrous box at home in terms of GPU, ram, and processing power, and it's mostly useful for running automated tests in multiple VMs at a time, kicking ass with ocl-hashcat, and doing hardware accelerated ML training. I don't do those things often, but I'm glad to have a beast when I do. Also, it's fun to eyefinity dual 4k on full settings ;)
Re storage: video editing readily comes to mind.
And multitrack audio recording.
That's way too many USB ports, SSDs on one machine.
BTW for devs out there that need that much horsepower, what do you do? (I understand needed 32 GB of ram which was not available in the latest MacBook pros, but when do you need that much storage?)