I don't think they could possibly make it cheap enough for that - especially once you consider all the money being wasted on RGB/Bluetooth/a GPU you won't use.

Messing around with weird consumer hardware in a datacenter context isn't exactly attractive. If all you need is some x86 cores, an off-the-shelf blade server approach gets you far more compute in the same space with far less hassle. Even if the purchase cost is attractive, TCO won't be.

Does it have IPMI? Does it have ECC ram? Racking Mac Minis is a painful enough, this form factor is less rackable than that. If you need to physically adjust the form factor per device, whatever you could've saved will be immediately lost in labor.

you don't remember playstation clusters?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_cluster

that said, practically buying hundreds of them should prove to be quite difficult.

I think the limitation on server gear these days is electricity price vs compute, with the hardware price being an up front investment but not dominating the lifetime cost. At least at this end of the price range - it's a consumer GPU, not an A100 or anything.

Iiuc, unlike Sony’s PS3 (which were bought and used like this), Steam is the unique distributor so it would be easy for them to not allow (or make really difficult to) buying thousands of machines.

(Or they could sell it everywhere for higher price but the Machine would come with a non transferable Steam gift card.)