For a contract that big, AWS will build you your own private datacenter. US intelligence bought one themselves back in 2013 [0] and AWS just built a second one for them (different security clearance for each)[1].

[0]: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/07/the-d...

[1]: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/publicsector/announcing-the-new...

I will take a guess that 1M core is a big compute grid.

You go to google cloud and order 10k preemptible instances per datacenter. That solves half of your problem. Then the same onto SoftLayer and AWS and revise monthly who is the cheapest one. It's not very difficult.

Contrary to you, I think that most places are not ready to accept that kind of contract. I have a friend who evaluated to move one of his compute grid to DigitalOcean and he was contacted to stop doing that, their servers are not meant to run at 100% CPU use all the time.

I wasn't talking about cloud providers, as for that kind of scale you're paying 3-4 times easy vs. hiring someone to prepare a cage design for you and wire it up at a suitable colo provider. And finding colo providers that can take a sufficient numbers of racks to be worthwhile is easy.

We were already paying colo providers by the MW and had the people to build out the space. It's just that the upfront capex required for a colo provider to build capacity was getting to a point where that meant a significant bet on their part on our continued growth. Thus we started having to look at one options, one of which is to contract them to build bespoke infra.

Regarding cloud being much higher cost: indeed. Anecdotal evidence; I know of a big reference customer who said they would consider the move to cloud a success if total cost didn't go up more than 2x. A few years in, that hadn't happened yet...

Agreed. It's a hassle to negotiate a few racks and that's barely a few millions dollars. I can't imagine doing that for a hundred rack at a times.

Twice as much would be a huge savings. In the cloud, I can give you 20k cores in one hour and I can give you 100k cores in two hours, after the initial investment to open multiple regions and networks backbones. The price is known in advance and the investment can be cancelled anytime.

Obtaining the same 20k cores from a colo will be a hassle. Months of negotiations with nothing being done. I'd expect any sane provider to bail if trying to discuss 100k cores, it's too much upfront investment. It would take years to get half of it, the project is long abandoned before anything is delivered and everyone who worked on it has left.

Our use case was actually very mixed. Certainly throw in somewhere around 100PB of storage if you want to do a semi accurate napkin math.