AWS's pricing model works kinda at their OMG eyewatering scale - aka all the custom hardware they design is highly cost optimized, but just doing custom hardware has a notable cost. This is easily covered by their scale, to make for their famous margins. [during their low scale times, they did use a good bit of HP/Dell, etc]
Oxide seems to be no different (super custom hardware) only major difference being the "in your datacenter" part. Since you own the cost of your datacenter, Oxide has to come in a lot cheaper to even compete with AWS, but how do you do that with low volume [and from the look of it not-cost optimized, but instead fairly tank-like] bespoke hardware? Feels like the pricing / customer fundamentals are going to be pretty rough here outside perhaps a few verticals.
I imagine, some of the customers will order 1-2 racks half full and over a few years possibly add a few sleds, these will probably demand great GUI/ manual experience and possibly competitive Oracle/ SAP/ MSSQL benchmarks and I can imagine Veeam integreation. Other customers such as the DoE or some big enterprise customers will order whole rows of racks and demand perfect automation options. That is just a guess.
Which should be pretty easy. I don't know the exact costs but in a previous Oxide discussion the number 1M was thrown around. If that's roughly correct, that is comfortably less than a single year of AWS bills at most startups I've been in (except the very tiny ones < 15 people).
Haven't seen any performance numbers either so admittely estimating here, but from what I know about building racks of 1U servers and knowing that Oxide is more efficient, I can believe an Oxide rack should handily outperform the AWS VMs we (the startups) were paying >>>100K/mo for.
If these numbers are anywhere in the ballpark, an Oxide rack should easily be saving quite a bit of money already by year two.