Maybe i read too much in to “depend on used hardware sales.” Ive worked for 2/5 and 3/15 largest us companies doing cloud and infra stuff. Recovered costs from EOL hardware has just never ever mattered. Not even a rounding error on P&L and hardware/dc org has 1000 higher value priorities. Ill admit maybe the offset costs were squirreled away in finance but not visible to the business.
Even with zero resale value thats “fine.” Anytime Ive owned capacity planning it’d be more cost effective to pay someone a multiple of rack MRC to get the hardware out and free up the space and whips. The impediment was almost always free hands and coordination functions that were being spent on new adds rather than replacement.
E-waste disposal is a huge cost, and it might be entirely possible you're not seeing the cost, or you're not aware of what a badly negotiated contract looks like.
Also, a lot of the industry runs on incredibly poor margins. The only datacenter space in the world right now printing money is either owned by clouds or owned by the AI bubble (which are sometimes the same companies, or the cloud leasing space to the AI bubble).
Mostly, profits are eaten by power deals (this is why Facebook put their biggest important DCs up where the cheapest power in the US is) or property ownership (buying land, building the DC, paying property taxes, maintaining the building, etc, that shit aint cheap), and then you get to buy hardware and hopefully get customers.
Amazon, Google, Facebook, et al all cheat their way through every loophole known to man to keep the costs down and the profit high; not a lot of it is from scale, even though they're still trying to chase that to the end, too.
Even with zero resale value thats “fine.” Anytime Ive owned capacity planning it’d be more cost effective to pay someone a multiple of rack MRC to get the hardware out and free up the space and whips. The impediment was almost always free hands and coordination functions that were being spent on new adds rather than replacement.