Well, the cable junction is also part of what really happens.
Not quite as much. If the cable junction fails, someone downstream of that junction won't have access to the calculations, but someone upstream of it still will. Whereas, if the clock in a CPU fails, there's no calculations happening anywhere.
What if instead of a cable junction for AWS, it was more like a clock in a CPU? Then it is part of what "really happens," but only a part.