I worked for a financial company that ran a private cloud. They provided everyone with beefy workstations (16 physical cores, 32 GB of RAM). 3/4 of those resources were allocated to a VM that ran a custom compute platform that took jobs off of a queue. The explanation was simple. it was easier/cheaper to leverage the workstations than it was to build out the same compute in the datacenter. Granted, there was about a 5 degree temperature differential between under and over my desk, but I didn't complain. Kept me nice and toasty while I worked. This was +10 years ago. Each workstation had 2 Intel Xeons plus an nVidia Quadro for GPU work. Not sure if they've kept up with the tech, but I imagine they have. $10k/workstation wasn't a problem then, and from what I hear, it's probably not a problem now.

That's pretty cool. Sounds to me like a corporate SETI@home.

One recurring issue was the customer's network latency. A corporate vpn that bounces traffic around adds enough latency to make a really good solution feel comparable to using vnc. Reorganizing the network adds to the cost of the solutions.

I'm currently experiencing this. I live near my office and have sufficiently fast home internet. But connecting to the company network and attempting to work on a machine remotely is very painful. Working locally and commiting or accessing mail is still painful, but managable.