Excerpt from the 1985 letter to shareholders

We sold all the equipment in the entire factory, all of which were fully functional machines. The purchase cost was about $13 million, and after years of accelerated depreciation, the book value was only $866,000. But if we were to buy this equipment new today, it would cost about $30 to $50 million. Do you know how much we got for selling it?

For disposing of all the equipment, we received a total of $163,122. After deducting selling and moving costs, the net value was negative. The new looms we bought back in 1981 for $5,000 each couldn't even fetch a $50 offer now. They finally sold for $26 each, which wasn't even enough to pay the movers' wages.

My thoughts below,

Textile mills are not profitable, but the factories that sell textile machinery are.

Are the three clouds (major cloud providers) textile mills? Definitely not, because their products and services are not just raw computing power, but a supporting ecosystem, network, data, security, and so on. But some small and medium-sized companies that purely sell computing power are a different story. I'm talking about $Coreweave(CRWV.US) and the like.

Regarding storage

I personally think storage companies are more like textile mills, except they are currently in a stage of supply shortage (of course, I don't know when that will end, and it doesn't look like it will end in the short term). But where storage companies buy their "textile machinery" is a more interesting question.

$Microsoft(MSFT.US)$Amazon(AMZN.US)$Alphabet - C(GOOG.US)