Why did Railway choose to invest heavily in its own physical bare-metal hardware?

Relying exclusively on public cloud hyperscalers creates crippling gross margin ceilings when you reach planetary scale. We invested tens of millions of dollars into owning and operating our own bare-metal compute hardware and networking fabric. Owning our hardware allows us to pass dramatic performance and cost efficiencies back to customers while retaining a payback period of just a few months on capital expenditure.