A 16-core 4565p is of course faster in max single thread speed than a 96-core that GCP is running at an economically optimal base clock.

A year ago I gave a talk about optimizing Cloud cost efficiency and I did a comparison of colocation vs cloud over time. You might find it interesting here, linking to the relative part: https://youtu.be/UEjMr5aUbbM?si=4QFSXKTBFJa2WrRm&t=1236

TLDR, colocation broke even in 6 to 18 months for on-demand and 3y reserve cloud respectively. But spot instances can actually be quite cheaper than colocation.

You generally don't go to the cloud for the price (except if we are talking hetzner etc).