There is currently a bit of an early shift back to physical infra. Some of this is driven by costs(1), some by geopolitical concerns, and some by performance. However, dealing with physical equipment does introduce a different set (old fashioned, but somewhat atrophied) set of skills and costs that companies need to deal with.

(1) It is shocking how much of a move to the cloud was driven by accountants wanting opex instead of capex, but are now concerned with actual cashflow and are thinking of going back. The cloud is really good at serving web content and storing gobs of data, but once you start wanting to crunch numbers or move that data, it gets expensive fast.

> I can only see cloud getting even more expensive, not less.

When you have three major hyperscalers competing for your dollars this is basically not true and not how markets work...unless they start colluding on prices.

We've already seen reduction in prices of web services costs across the three major providers due to this competitive nature.

And it’ll be so good and cheap that you’ll figure “hell, I could sell our excess compute resources for a fraction of AWS.” And then I’ll buy them, you’ll be the new cloud. And then more people will, and eventually this server infrastructure business will dwarf your actual business. And then some person in 10 years will complain about your IOPS pricing, and start their own server room.