That’s less than the monthly salary of 10 software engineers, and assuming they pay API prices, probably earns itself back in about a year.

Having said that, I don’t think it’s all that tempting for companies at all, considering this whole market is developing rapidly and it’s nearly impossible to predict where we’ll be at in a year or two.

As in who pays for it or how did I arrive at that number?

For who pays for it, obviously the employer would.

For "how did I arrive at this number" Ballpark estimate from what I know about part cost. Most of that money will go towards AI cards about $5k for the mb, cpu, power supply, etc. $45k would be for as much ram and as big/expensive nVidia cards as you can get your hands on. The B300 has 288GB of VRAM in it. Probably what you'd be after.