> it also doesn't say they acquired "commodity hardware"; I took it to suggest the opposite, presumably for good reason.

This seems entirely like wishful thinking. They were using a 12 year old server that was increasingly unfit for the day-to-day task of building Android applications. It doesn't seem like they were in a position to acquire and deploy any exotic hardware (except to the extent that really old hardware can be considered exotic and no longer a commodity). I'd be surprised if the new server is anything other than off the shelf x86 hardware, and if we're lucky then maybe they know how to do something useful with a TPM or other hardware root of trust to secure the OS they're running on this server and protect the keys they're signing builds with.