Sounds like they are building a new OS written in rust sitting at the level of bios, beneath a standard Linux kernel. This will be an open source bios running at or below the hypervisor supervisor ring level.
I've been involved in two investigations into migrating from an incumbent on-prem cloud to The Cloud. Once directly, once tangentially. Both times, the conclusion was that The Cloud would almost certainly increase our IT costs, and also submit us to vendor lock-in.
I see The Cloud as being a great play for new companies, and companies with server needs that are both variable and out of phase with everyone else's. Small startups because time is their most precious resource, and picking a major PaaS provider minimizes the time spent making decisions about things that are tangential to the core business. e.g., if you use AWS then you don't have to hesitate for a moment on your object store; it's going to be S3. If you use on-prem cloud, then you'll likely have to burn a few weeks shopping around for vendors and getting it rolled out before you can be up and running. Multiply that cost by every single decision, and you've got a whole lot of distraction hitting you at the most inconvenient possible time.
Plenty of companies, including medium-sized companies and companies in non-tech industries (finance, healthcare, defense, etc.)
Generally for regulatory/security reasons, and also because it can make financial sense.
I can see that Dell, Lenovo, etc. are already offering "Kubernetes" optimized servers; it's not clear how much of it is just marketing, though. Perhaps this new company wants to offer something similar, but be more competitive by taking advantage of superior software design skills (if I understand it correctly). Then it would just be a middleware company disguising itself as a "computer company".
