I'll try to find the link in a moment, but Microsoft was doing something like this 5+ years back. The premise was similar to Google using commodity hardware in their datacenters. Throw together "compute blocks", set them all up and when performance degrades sufficiently you remove the container and install a new one in its place.
EDIT:
Also, I'm surprised I got the time right, for some reason 2005-2012 is one big blur to me and I usually pick the wrong end of that range when guessing when things happened. It also seems that none of these articles mention what I recalled reading in articles years ago about just replacing a box once its performance degrades. I'm either misremembering or that ended up being a non-feature once fielded.
The newest Azure data center in Iowa(?) was going to be open air. Basically a pile of these containers in a field, with a big fence over it and a roof similar to a big car-port (no walls). They figured it was going to be better for cooling.
In addition to the links below, Raytheon has deployed many 'Electronic Modular Enclosures' which house power/cooling/servers enclosed in a TEU'ish container. They've been in use since 2005'ish in the DoD and brought up in the recent 'Navy ship uses Linux' story from last week.
A previous employer used a TEU contained power/cooling/servers for mobile disaster recovery circa 2003. More recently some have used fuel cells in place of diesel generators.
Is this true? Does anyone know why? The article seems to assume it without saying why.