As speed goes up the cost / Mtoken will necessarily go down at roughly the same ratio so it will wash out. The still use hardware or sell hardware value is factored in to the amortized monthly cost, it assumes a 3 year markdown, and does not factor in the cost of money which should almost cancel the resale value in the end, which I think is quite accurate (any residual cost on a graphics card after 3 years is so small compared to the current price it should be discounted and in included there).

Where you might win by owning your own hardware: - Hardware costs go up, and thus api costs go up. You've locked in your pricing. - Chinese/Open models become illegal/hard to access the way we do now. OpenAI and Anthropic are trying very hard to build a regulatory capture scheme to do this. I think they will be unsuccessful because China just won't participate.

There is a critical shortage right now, if the AI datacenter boom slows the prices could crash very quickly.