That's roughly 250x more than it would cost to perform this stunt using on-demand Cloud Bigtable, if my math checks out (~1150 nodes @ 85¢/hour for 1h).

I did not know men could build such things.

I estimated the cluster to achieve this was ~$3-4k per-hour. I am thinking there is a typo on the r8g.16xlarge and they are actually r8gd.16xlarge (notice the d) which comes with directly attached nvme disks.