I dunno, there are ad-tech companies with less than 20 engineers who're processing millions of events per minute on their endpoints, and trying to do various things with that data. This from personal experience.

Of course, I would love if someone gave me the mandate to go out and build something like F1...

You couldn't even hire a couple of experienced engineers let alone come close to affording to build F1. There are several zeros in the cost difference.

I can think of quite a few companies that are big enough to require something like Aerospike, but wouldn't be willing to outfit all their machines with a GPS receiver.

Even if your company has 20 billion in cash, if your department isn't called "sales" or "marketing", good luck getting the budget for that.

And honestly, if you have money, it's a lot simpler and less risky to just hire 20 DBAs and programmers to build a database application that can handle that kind of operation. Low latency, network-partition-resistant, high-performance database applications are not a new thing.