Wait, one of your 1U servers costs more than $16,000?! Are your servers also money printing machines?
I don't know about 1U, but a 2U unit with 8 x E5-2670 & 256Gb ram (without infiniband, SSDs or other flashy bits) would cost a bit more than that. Throw a few Tesla GPUs into a case as well and it's easy for the costs to mount up.