re: Barriers to entry to the server business--can they really be that large?

as others have said it is/was just easier/cheaper to just use a cloud provider, and that necessarily implies that there was no economic case to be made for building MAGAcloud or whatever.

now, to answer your question directly: yes. this stuff is almost all made in china. the supply issues for everything (including IT stuff, servers AND components) coming from there have definitely been disrupted since the start pandemic.

so even if you had the power, bandwidth, and square footage right now to start with, it's not a trivial thing to get the stuff that you would need to forklift in the door and set up.

the reason that you can launch newSuperAppService on itunes and google play in such a short amount of time is that you can purchase and spin up capacity on google cloud, AWS, salesforce.com, etc. to get up & running. that capacity is sitting there waiting to be provisioned for you already.