Same for internet connection, you can buy transit, no need to become your own ISP. So you don't need people who deal with peering agreements, etc.
For electricity you can make a support deal with a local electrician company. You don't need a guy who can build and maintain a custom power supply unit.
It does help however to have someone with basic sysadmin and network skills. But if you don't have that, you will sooner or later screw up your AWS infrastructure too.
Maybe if you're wiring a closet in your office, but no colo facility is letting you within ten feet of their power infrastructure. The best you're getting is a racked-mounted UPS.
This is far more fiscally irresponsible for most companies than just using AWS.
We can argue whether it is billion dollars or few millions , but there are 1000s companies spending 50million + or even 500 million a year on compute globally.
For a lot of these companies it would make economic sense to keep their own DCs , however hiring that talent and retaining is very very hard, especially if you need even 1-100th of what AWS offers in their IaaS services, this is what will cost a company a lot more than cloud.
It is really shortage in devops/sysads that drives cloud . The talent shortage is just getting worse, newer devops engineers who know only k8s blink seeing a bare metal VM let alone know how to do proper cable management.
No, it's not. I've have never once met a company that went cloud because they couldn't find someone to rack and configure infrastructure. There's considerably more to building and running a data center than just hiring staff.
This thread is full of comments making it sound that running your own hardware is black magic and cloud is the only way to deploy at scale. Yes it is hard, but not so hard that spending $500 Million/year [1] on cloud is cheaper than running your own DC.
It is even harder for companies that already had investments in DC operations to justify.
Leveraging public clouds for workloads that need flexible scaling or use cloud native services which are not cost effective / feasible to develop in-house it always makes sense to shift, however the lift and shift for everything we have been seeing has no justification for companies already running their own infra unless developers and system admins are demanding cloud, either they want cloud in their resumes or don't know how anymore to write traditional applications.
Many enterprise apps even today are not cloud native or leverage anything beyond basic compute and storage IaaS services and do not have high load variations and not even set to auto-scale, they never had technical or economic reasons to be moved to the cloud if you already had sunk costs running a DC.
[1] We can argue what that number is all day , when including everything you need to do run a DC it is cheaper than on the Cloud. There is a definitely a number, as at very top end of usage companies like Apple or Facebook etc are not sitting on top of AWS and it would never make sense for them at their scale, somewhere in between that point does exist.
The rest of your comment makes it clear you're entirely speculating, like hiring being an obstacle to spending tens of millions of dollars to build a DC.
I am not entirely speculating, I have been part of the recruitment industry for the last decade, but you have already decided to discard statements from a random stranger on the internet (totally reasonable!) so no point in arguing this further.