The re-branded Dell servers Google sent out as search indexers (I believe) were pretty common 10-15 years ago. I remember seeing two of them here in Sweden alone, during my career.
But that is not the caseless DIY shelf-servers they've displayed in various PR videos.
For those custom servers, I remember reading that Google did not bother unracking and disposing of them, but let the dead ones sit in the rack indefinitely.
They figured out that it was more efficient to have hardware techs spend 100% of their time provisioning new hardware, and just let their software detect the broken servers, power them down, and route the tasks to working servers.
At some point the hyperscalers end up decommissioning their servers because of perf/watt concerns. I don't think they bother with single failures for the reasons you've stated, but they do decommission full sections of DCs once the wattage calculus no longer makes sense.
I did! I worked at a university at the time and another department was decommissioning one (a GSA). My group was looking for hardware at the time, so we snagged it. Under the yellow paint it was a bog-standard Dell PowerEdge. I think I still have a ridiculous picture somewhere of my team and I hustling the thing out through the parking lot like we were making off with super-secret Google hardware.
I mean, I like to bash on Google too, but this is just not even logical.
They want the spyware to run on your hardware. They don't need it on their hardware. If there is spyware on Goog's hardware, I'd be looking at it coming from certain three letter agencies or other nation states.
