The idea that everyone having their own personal at-home GPU (which will sit idle 99% of the time) is more efficient than everyone sharing a pool of GPUs in a data center baffles me.

Resilience versus optimisation. If the data centre goes down thousands of people cannot use them, if your laptop burns down, the other thousand users are unaffected.

There is also latency, security, control... there are many reasons to prefer local placement and direct ownership versus a shared pool resource in an undisclosed location that people unrelated to you can physically access

Why own a tv when everyone could go to the movie theatre? Why own a car when you can use public transit?

The prior main use for these cards - gaming - is infeasible over a network. The big boys have tried and failed, networks just aren’t good enough.

My local AI server at home stayed up yesterday. Copilot didn't. I can troubleshoot it if it goes down. My hands are kinda tied if somebody else's does.

Not leaking private data to hostiles isn't that bad.

Network latency would throttle their power consumption!