If you mean buying an actual server I order on menu regularly. If you mean a dedicated server in a DC then there are plenty of providers who can auto provision a bare metal instance for you. That was possible before AWS even opened up to public sales.

You’re not wrong, but generally the political friction of deploying a new service to k8s is lower than what you propose as well.

Well yes, but I run container orchestration on owned servers (Swarm, not Kubernetes) so it's really easy to add a new service at a whim and only quite rarely do we need to add capacity, to which we can also add in a cloud provider. But I'm using off-lease servers which are sort of bonkers as to how much capacity you get for the price. I think they cost less than a months spend on an equivalent cloud instance.

That’s a good point. Preemptable instance can be insanely cheap. I would guess it’s more efficient for the data center overall to shuttle services around to different nodes as needed.