Think of it more like a Fractal. The more population in a given area, the more server power dedicated to incrementally smaller chunks of space. If there are 1,000 people packed into a single ship, they may wind up with the equivalent of 30 servers working together to process all that data.
Of course, it's also all in the cloud, so the typical idea of a server goes right out the window, as it's eminently possible to "bond" dozens or even hundreds/thousands of physical servers together to achieve a single, unified (and ungodly powerful) machine.
That's essentially what they're aiming for. Right now, they're focused on single server performance, but eventually they'll get that all nailed down and move on to stitching multiples of them together. It'll take a lot of work, but the end result should be pretty drat spectacular by the time it's all done.
But I realy ask me how much money they have spent in total. That would be a good indicator for how long it takes to ship SC and the AAAA+ SQ42.
