If I was hosting 26 reasonably-available servers in my home office, that's quite high.

If I had to host 26 highly-available servers available to a geographically distributed group in a commercial or academic space with paid maintenance staff and some semblance of support.. that's actually pretty darn cheap.

That's about $737/m/server. Seems high to me.

this cost-per-server implies that all the money goes to the servers. There may be humans who need to get paid too. Unless they’re claiming that that’s just the technology cost?

Ridiculously high, but to be expected.