Ok, so make an enormous capital investment in tech that will be outdated in two years - if not already outdated, as you mentioned AMD and Intel. Then, I'll need to hire geniuses who can extract juice out of this hardware at a scale that not even Google, Amazon, Microsoft and others could.

Or, I rent just as much top performance hardware as I need, scaling as I go along, and worry about execution and implementation of my niche application instead. You can see why cloud is winning right now.