I don't really think anyone with anything less than an 8 figure budget can get the perf/watt of Graviton2. They're literally not available for sale - AWS had them fabbed and then kept all of them to rent out.

Hardware is difficult, for sure. The managed services / proprietary services is another story.

Having said that, and please keep in mind that I do not have an idea much about hardware so this is a guesswork; more of a question than a statement..., I do think that the Graviton price vs performance might not have a direct benefit outside of AWS. It's cool for AWS because they have less stuff to manage at that scale and it might be cheaper for them to buy and iterate because only they use it. It looks great to the clients because the perception is that the value is better. But AWS runs 80 AZs in 25 regions so it benefits them at that scale.

Realistically, even if one had couple of hundreds of racks, does it matter at that scale?

Anyone with less than an 8 figure budget shouldn't even begin to consider self-hosting.

It's called Ampere Altra. Maybe you should have picked a different example like Aurora...

Aurora is the one service that got us to migrate to AWS! Honestly it saved us 5 digits per month over another MySQLaaS. For us it was a very good deal. We could’ve dedicated engineering time to reduce db cost on the old provider but Aurora was drop-in awesomeness.

Have you tried? Us startuppy mortals can't buy those today, unfortunately. Maybe in a few years, when they trickle down from the people with 8 figure budgets.