> AWS eliminated all capex expenditures

You were always able to just rent servers running in someone else's data center.

AWS as we know it launched in 2006, [1] is Hetzner's homepage from 2001 offering dedicated servers for $125/month + $125 setup fee. By 2005 [2] you can get a AMD Athlon XP 3000+ with 1 GB RAM and 350GB traffic for 39€/month.

1: https://web.archive.org/web/20010813053224/http://www.hetzne...

2: https://web.archive.org/web/20050507034045/http://www.hetzne...