Comment by Sesse__

> Additionally, the console had been selling at a profit, at least in the US, by 2009, before they removed the other os feature.

Also, there is no evidence that the PS3 clusters were particularly widespread. The largest single PS3 cluster I know of was the USAF 1760-machine cluster; the second largest was about 200 machines at EPFL. With 87M+ PS3s sold, that's a drop in the ocean. The PS3 just wasn't very good as a general-purpose server, and it also didn't have good interconnect at all (people struggled to even reach 100Mbit/sec on it, so it's also not a very good general HPC server); if you didn't have a problem that mapped really well to Cell, it just wasn't for you. There's no evidence any significant amount of companies bought tens of thousands of PS3s for their datacenters.

So even if Sony _did_ lose money on each sold PS3 used for servers, there simply can't have been a lot of money in all.