An RTX 5060 Ti 16GB card costs about $800 on Amazon right now. Running 18.4 hours a day ( off peak electric rate schedule ) it can process approximately 109.3 million tokens per month. The card has a 90 day return window. Credit card interest + electricity puts the cost at $80 total out of pocket, to use this card for 3 months and return it.

Paying an AI provider came out to $1,639.50 for the same 3 months of 18.4 hour a day usage.

You know its a bubble when ... $80 vs $1,639.50

I understand that if you're a major corporation, or a researcher that needs 100+ gpus for a large project, unless you have access to your own supercomputer, the economics will be different.

This was for "individual coder at home" scenarios.

tl;dr ... im exploiting jeff bezos, and math is racist. too funny.

I guess people have never heard of "options" before.

I optioned a video card for 90 days. My bad.

The performance of local AI for coding, given correct setup & harness, is very good and on par for 95% of use cases compared to closed models.

Local usage for end-users is unmetered and token speeds are very fast and keep improving every few weeks due to optimizations being done in the community.

Data remains local which makes EU compliance checkboxes way easier since data never touches anything related to the CLOUD act.

We're back to early 90s prices.

EDIT: Yes, obviously you don't need a RTX5090 to play games. But it seems to me like the top GPU market is now exclusively for the local LLM users.