Ask HN: Why don't quant hedge funds have hardware labs?

If I'm a hedge fund, I want to have data that (a) is useful for figuring out what to buy and sell and (b) other hedge funds don't have. The latter lets me outcompete hedge funds. Hedge funds even have systems for people (mostly brokers/investment banks) submit ideas to them on what to trade, and get rewarded if it's profitable.[1] Numerai has an explicit platform for this.[2]

Why, then, don't hedge funds run their own hardware / R&D labs that design and deploy sensors to get data about the world other hedge funds don't have? Why don't hedge funds build and launch a bunch of cheap satellites with interesting sensors that only the hedge fund has access to? Or footfall sensors in major cities? Or agricultural sensors in target geographies?

Taken to the extreme, why don't hedge funds build e.g. Twitter to figure out what people are talking about and why, but then not let anyone use the API? Or why didn't they build Google Streetview to figure out what was in the world and where?

In other words: why don't we see more hedge funds trying to go get information about the world themselves instead of buying it from data vendors?

I guess the best answer is the return doesn't justify the cost. Better to just buy thousands of different datasets from different data vendors instead.

But is there maybe a different answer where it's just "culturally, that's not what people at hedge funds do or think about"?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_capture_system [2] https://signals.numer.ai