> It'd be hard to use that sort of money for a consumer-purpose PC; maybe a higher end server, but then you likely end up with a blade form factor.

No, not at all. This isn't a workstation. It's a Workstation. It's not even a struggle to beat $12k.

A Mac Pro starts at $6k. You can add a 28 core Xeon for +$7k. 1.5 TB of memory is +$25k. Twin Radeons with 64 GB of video ram is another +$10k. 8TB of storage is another +$2.5k. You've picked CPU, RAM, graphics, and storage and you're already over $50k. That's no software. No display. Just the tower, a power cable, a mouse, a keyboard, and MacOS.

If you go to Dell and check out their Data Science Workstations, it's not difficult to configure one for over a quarter of a million dollars. Triple graphics cards, 6 TB of memory, dual 28-core processors. In a tower computer.

If you go and spec up a HP Z workstation or Dell's comparable offering you can blow through it in no time. Just starting with putting in a TB of RAM will cost a fair bit.