Marc Benioff on the commoditization of data centers

We've all heard about these multi-hundred-billion-dollar data center investments...  We have not been doing that.  We're a software company so we're all about building that software over the last 26 years to run on those data centers.  And we've just never seen prices this low for deployment because it is a huge level of investment, and when you get this huge level of investment, it drops prices.  And that means that for us, we're able to run and deploy at a very low cost and it's a commodity product.  Data center against a data center against a data center.  A chipset against a chipset against a chipset.  These are fundamental commodities.  So whether we're running on Alibaba in China or Amazon or Google or maybe somebody else in the future, these are just commodity centers.  And the prices have never been lower, so you have this opportunity to take advantage of companies who are competing with each other to be the next generation hyperscaler.

~ Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, "Ray Dalio and Salesforce’s Benioff on AI, trade wars and new world order," CNBC International Live, 10:20 mark, March 14, 2025