At the local/hobby scale, it’s very much a “do whatever” area. But I can rent a 4090 for a little under a dollar an hour, and I can rent a b200 for $6, it’s very hard to claim I’ll use 10k+ hours of gpu time on a b2000 I buy for myself.

So 83 days for payback at the 2k sticker price for the 4090? Sounds like a good time to buy a 4090...

Like, if you buy that card it can still be processing things for you a decade from now.

Or you can get 3 months of rental time.

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And yes, there is definitely a point where renting makes more sense because the capital outlay becomes prohibitive, and you're not reasonably capable of consuming the full output of the hardware.

But the cloud is a huge cash cow for a reason... You're paying exorbitant prices to rent compared to the cost of ownership.