Yep, I was surprised to learn that too.

For a small cluster no, but at major data center level yes. Which is why they building data centers bigger than stadiums.

If you spend 10B on a data center, roughly 30% of that price is going to hardware, so roughly $ 3B.

So for two data centers you're spending 20B.

Now, assume there's hardware that performs twice as fast at same energy (watt/token), even if it costed you twice you're saving 7B because you don't need the second data center.

You get the same output of $ 20 B out of a $ 13 B initial investment, but you're also halving operational costs: less staff, less lawyers, etc, etc.

This is the reason why Nvidia is making gargantuan margins: hyper scalers don't really care about hardware cost, if they can get double the output and save themselves 30-40% of total costs and 50% of the headaches they will keep buying at twice the price gen over gen.