Can someone explain in simple terms what this company will be building? I cannot tell from this post or the other on Oxide.
Computers. Literal, physical computers you can buy and stick in a server rack.
Specifically, computers with the hardware/software optimized and tuned for "hyperscaler" uses (think Kubernetes).
I see The Cloud as being a great play for new companies, and companies with server needs that are both variable and out of phase with everyone else's. Small startups because time is their most precious resource, and picking a major PaaS provider minimizes the time spent making decisions about things that are tangential to the core business. e.g., if you use AWS then you don't have to hesitate for a moment on your object store; it's going to be S3. If you use on-prem cloud, then you'll likely have to burn a few weeks shopping around for vendors and getting it rolled out before you can be up and running. Multiply that cost by every single decision, and you've got a whole lot of distraction hitting you at the most inconvenient possible time.
I can see that Dell, Lenovo, etc. are already offering "Kubernetes" optimized servers; it's not clear how much of it is just marketing, though. Perhaps this new company wants to offer something similar, but be more competitive by taking advantage of superior software design skills (if I understand it correctly). Then it would just be a middleware company disguising itself as a "computer company".
And plenty of people run, e.g., OpenStack on their own hardware in their own server rooms / DCs.
The speed of light isn't getting quicker any time soon, so low-latency processing of locally-generated data requires local compute resource.