it's inclusive of power, redundant circuits, battery backup, diesel generator, 17 ISP trunk with redundant network routes, remote hands included in a SOC 2 cage - so yeah it's not just a bunch of "open space in a colo" - it's also not just a run of the mill facility it's a tier 4 facility. It doesn't come up that often and it's built into the pricing. I know you are trying to be helpful, but it comes off as patronizing and like I haven't literally had a cabinet in that space since covid and have never done this before and don't know what things cost.
Austin fucking sucks for colo space and everyone wants outrageous amounts of money for single cabinet stuff and they are all hard to work with for a single cabinets worth of space. Also I'm not really aware of any Tier 4 facilities here that aren't gouging the fuck out of you.
We would be someone's DR site - the entire point would be to not get into the business of "handling peoples data" it would be to give them a place to buy raw capacity in increments that dont demand a quarter cab or full cab. You are way overcomplicating this, I'm not trying to be some colo subcontractor I'm trying to use something that is made available to make a bit of extra cash and not looking to scale it into some crazy tech business. If I wanted to build out a 40 rack cage I could do that, that's not what I'm trying to do. I'm looking at a turnkey thing we can put a bunch of hardware in and lease to a small customer base.
I probably buy what your company sells and I've had a long working relationship with The Server Store who are in Dallas and provide NBD replacement out of their facility which is less than 12 minutes away from the colo, it's worked out pretty awesome and been same day a lot of the times for me because of that.
You can get a dual node dual 3rd generation xeon platinum with 40c/80t and 1T of DRAM with quad 10GbE RJ45 and 24TB of NVMe per node for 23k all in with a 5 year replacement nbd warranty (160 cores, 2TB of DRAM and 48TB of NVMe and 8 10gbps uplinks) in 2u and still have 39 more to spare if you count the switch. That alone equivalent in AWS (an i4i instance is nearly identical hardware) is 16k/mo (192k/yr) on demand and 10k/mo (120k up front, 360k tot) reserved 3 years.
Getting 10 of those for 220k and having half a petabyte of NVMe, 1.6k cores and 20TB of DRAM is something you can do some pretty interesting things with that don't require you to scale beyond that single RU.