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.