That's because of company policies. An SME owner will buy a server and have it in the rack the next day.

Of course creating a VM is still a teraform commit away (you're not using clickops in prod surely)

bayindirh 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

SME and "a server" is doing some big weight lifting here.

If you want a custom server, one or a thousand, it's at least a couple of weeks.

If you want a powerful GPU server, that's rack + power + cooling (and a significant lead time). A respectable GPU server means ~2KW of power dissipation and considerable heat.

If you want a datacenter of any size, now that's a year at least from breaking ground to power-on.

	▲	selkin an hour ago \| parent [-]
		And multiple years from the boardroom making a decision to build a data center to breaking ground.

▲

amluto 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

If you want something at all customized, it takes longer than that to receive the server. That being said, you can buy a server that will outperform anything the cloud can give you at much better cost.