They are one of the most well capitalized company/startup/foundation/non-profit in the planet and just spent 6,5 billion to hire a designer.

They should be using the best technical and cheapest solution, and they owe it to their investors. At their scale they will never be able to use anything else than a cloud solution.

They could solve these issues at the number of users they report, for a monthly bill below 25 million dollars.

"6,311 database instances running the PostgreSQL-compatible and MySQL-compatible editions of Amazon Aurora processed more than 376 billion transactions, stored 2,978 terabytes of data, and transferred 913 terabytes of data" - https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/how-aws-powered-prime-day-2...

> At their scale they will never be able to use anything else than a cloud solution.

That's definitely not true, and there are many companies doing higher volumes at a fraction of the cost-per-query.

Although scale doesn't force companies into public-cloud database systems, considerations like capital, time-to-market, and business strategy often do. In this case, OpenAI is trading a significantly higher per-query cost for benefits like improved agility, turnkey compliance, etc.

but that'd be real money, not the Monopoly money they used to buy Ive/Windsurf...