[capableweb]

Heh, you work at AWS or Google Cloud perhaps? ;) (Only joking about this as I constantly see employees from AWS/GCloud and other cloud providers claim that cloud is always cheaper than hosting things yourself)

Sure, if you're planning to service a large number of users, building your infrastructure in-house might be a bit overkill, as you'll need a infrastructure team to service it as well.

If you're just want to buy 4 GPUs to put in one server to run some training yourself, I don't think it's that much overkill. Especially considering you can recover much of the cost even after a year by selling much of the equipment you bought. Most of your losses will be costs for electricity and internet connection.

[dekhn]

I used to work for Google Cloud (I built a predecessor to Preemptible VMs and also launched Google Cloud Genomics). But even before I worked at Google I was a big fan of AWS (EC2 and S3).

Buying and selling hardware isn't free; it comes with its own cost. I would not want to be in the position of selling a $100K box of computer equipment- ever.

[capableweb]

:)

True, but some things are harder to sell than others. A100's in today's market would be easy to sell. Harder to buy, because the supply is so low unless you're Google or another big name, but if you're trying to sell them, I'm sure you can get rid of them quickly.

[throwaway50601]

Cloud gives you very good price for what they offer - excellent reliability, hyper-scalability. Most people don't need either and use it as a glorified VPS host.