The market for AI is never going to be sustainable based on the average home user. It's about businesses. And when the big AI companies are forced to raise prices to keep investors happy, they're going to start looking into hosting their own. I don't know how much we pay, but the company I work for has a couple dozen software engineers with Claude, and a bunch more employees who also get AI they use in their work. If AI prices suddenly quadrupled, I bet the CEO and CTO would be looking very seriously at buying a server to run models locally. And if that happens across the whole economy, it's going to hurt the big companies hard.

Even worse if they're getting hit from two angles. If governments and local communities keep making it hard for them to build datacentres, their rising costs are going to make them have an even harder time without raising prices even further, driving more smaller companies into self-hosting. If the pushback on datacentres is strong enough, they may not be able to keep up the practices causing hardware prices to be so high, making it more affordable to self-host, too.

Meanwhile, Nvidea is chuffed either way. They don't care if OpenAI or CRUDs r Us buys their chips. They get paid either way.