Offices cost more than cubes. An office needs a door, ceiling, lights, lighting control, sometimes a sidelight (window), floor/wall finishes, HVAC, along with a couple receptacles and a data opening. This costs more than an 8x8 cube.
Don't underestimate the cost of that 8x8 cube, Its astronomical. Up to $10,000 though of course you can get crap for $500.
When I built our office out, it cost $150 per walled-off office plus door.
That stuff doesn’t exist when a space is being completely remodeled either. I work in construction doing tenant improvements, so I see a lot of construction drawings.
My office buildout was 10 years ago. Prices change. Do we really think drywall in bulk is going to exceed $5000 per cube?
The average office that has cubicles, though, is also one that’s wired for per-employee power delivery.
Or, I could say it as the reverse: if you know you’re setting up an office to have fixed workstations (e.g. a CG art department in a video game studio; or any department in a company with a pipeline whose main software is a hog, like desktop publishing), then you’ll likely set up with cubicles rather than open-plan, because a workstation kind of implies gradual personalization with bunch of surrounding cruft that needs floors and walls and shelving.
(I have a feeling that even in FAANG, the people who use workstations aren’t sitting in open-plan areas. Anyone care to speak to that?)
And, because of this, the “standard” kind of cubicle partitions are expensive, because they’re also expected to work to handle part of the wiring requirements for power delivery. If they were just plyboard, they’d be cheap; but they’re not just plyboard.
Power poles are less common, but still used sometimes. It costs less for open area lighting vs lighting an office.
You can buy decent cubes for $2000, with full-height walls.
I’m not a fan of working in an open office layout, fwiw.
At my old job, we devised a way to make an "office door" out of a section of cube wall that was only attached on one side with a rubber sheath used to hide the seams. It actually worked out pretty well.
https://www.bunnings.com.au/gyrprock-csr-3600-x-1200-x-16mm-...
That's non-trade price, probably something like $US42 each. So, couple hundred bucks for that, then the rest (taping, joining, painting). Then the electrical.
That's without labour costs.
The space required by that door could add 25-50% to your total space requirements compared to cubes of the same size.
And that's before we add human perception as an element... offices the size of a cube are a horrible experience. They need to be considerably larger to feel like the same amount of space.