When opex is a primary benefit of the cloud, that's specifically for start-ups and other businesses that have little working capital. The actual primary benefit of the cloud for most cloud customers is flexibility - prior to AWS adoption, getting a server provisioned could be a multi-week if not multi-month affair negotiating between devs or operators and on-prem infrastructure workers to get the servers through capacity planning and provisioning. AWS made provisioning so simple, that you could start to set up auto-scaling, because you had extraordinarily high confidence that the capacity would be immediately available when your autoscaler tried to scale up.

But opex is not a benefit of the cloud for heavy/established businesses. Cloud opex is a financial expenditure every month that you can't get rid of and counts directly against your profits. Indeed, the desire for capex in the cloud is so high that businesses routinely purchase Reserved Instances and other forms of committed usage, which allows accountants to treat the cost of the RI as capex and then discount the expenditure through depreciation (to zero, since there will be nothing to sell when the RI expires) over the lifetime of the RI. It is normal and frequent for businesses to make capital expenditures to reduce their operational expenditures over time, thus increasing their monthly/quarterly profits.

Oxide's unique value proposition is to give customers, particularly those with high monthly cloud bills that they have difficulty reducing, the operational flexibility of cloud computing with the profit-improving benefits of capital expenditures.