The complaints about the complaints about cloud costs vs on-prem often deliberately ignore that there is a spectrum of options between "cloud" and "on-prem". This is not a binary choice between these two extremes.

Your air-conditioned room plus networking can easily be rented from a multitude of providers, for example, in different variants from "el cheapo" to "ultra-high-professional with lots of fancy certificates". You can then place your own hardware in rented racks, you can buy your own racks and place them in rented space, or you can rent everything including the hardware.