In my experience with modest specifications, you can source servers from tier 1 vendors (Dell, HPE, etc) with 5 years of support for less than a 1 year commitment for the roughly equivalent AWS or GCE instances (without prepayment).

The monthly opex to house and power and cool those servers isn't _negligible_, but if you're doing back of napkin math comparing MRCs to Cloud you can just deduct the costs from their bandwidth charges that have been marked up 10,000%

If you want recurring monthly costs for capital devices there are companies setup to do that for you.

They lease you the equipment. Yay.

by servers i think they meant microservice apps/binaries/vms/containers, etc not physical machines. I also want to know what physical hardware they purchased, where they racked them, how much colocation costs, etc, etc and they go into none of that.