If we're speculating, Pixar is also announcing it's Renderman 25 XPU cloud native render tech. If gpu cluster & virtualization continues to explode and transform the effects industry. I imagine all the major studios would seek ancillary revenue, farming out their cloud investments during idle hours, to third parties in gov research and academics to use for large scale data viz ;)
When I was on the design team for the Lucas Presidio Campus, we were collapsing all the various divisions to the new campus, aside from Skywalker...
I was the LV/Datacenter/network designer for the project.
One of the early design requirements was to 1) have fiber to the desktop and 2) have every machine on an interconnect matrix which brought the edge desktop connections as close to the core as possible such that every workstation would become a part of the ender cluster when idle/at night/on-demand etc...
This didnt happen but it was a goal back in ~2004
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I recall them telling us when Jobs came to visit and they had the "Death Star" <-- render cluster they were working on... Lucas apparently saw no future and sold it to Jobs for ~$10mm?? and thats where Pixar got it start.
That was an amazing fun project to work on.
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Oh - and during the design sessions, Cisco borked the design review for their (joke of a response) to the RFP, the then CIO for LucasArts in this design meeting with ILM, Lucas, Cisco others -- he says to the entire team in dead seriousness
"When can I have power-over-fiber to the desktop" with a look like "Ha! GotchA!
My experience from when I was in the industry was the opposite. Studios would generally maintain a solid baseline renderfarm and then send overflow to the major cloud providers.
They also weren't really set up for the kind of strict isolation and security that offering resources to external parties would require.
