Comment by ball_of_lint
10 hours ago
If it's cloud compute that would be otherwise unused, the business is not paying for the electricity or wear. And they specifically put it in terms of marginal cost - Yeah there'd be an improvement from reselling this idle compute instead, but just using the cycles that would otherwise have been wasted doesn't change the status quo.
In the sense that the company paying to reserve a certain quantity of computer time isn't the owner or operator of the machines providing it, and has paid for that time by the hour, or something?