[j45]

A homelab, running something like Proxmox, spends a great deal of it's time mostly idling with the odd thing spiking for basic homelab tasks (storage, sharing, etc).

Doing GPU/intensive type tasks is more purpose driven than a homelab. For this, you can get a NAS with dedicated GPU for transcoding if you wanted, etc.

The call for large amounts of compute/GPU makes a lot of sense, and there's a lot of ways to get there depending on what's needed, relative to the electricity bill you're OK with if it ends up idling a lot more than anticipated.

Adding a mac mini/studio for crunching certain things might be enough for a single person or household. Adding other demands or users beyond that could change it.

I'm familiar with racks and gear, and had way too much of it when I pulled out of datacenters and went more virtual and cloud. The nice thing now is a lot of that virtualization can come home with a bit of the data center (power backups, internet backups, etc)