It's not that hard. You can literally use any old computer. I was home labbing long before I became a SWE. Something like Ansible can make deterministic bare metal config that could be accessible to more people.
I find home IT / tech support questions are a fantastic use of AI. AI helps me mess with all these different configs and figure out what the source of a problem is, when I give it the symptoms I am seeing in my network.
So, I hope someday that people can buy a box with a local AI tech support assistent which can make it even more accessible to set up a personal cloud. This will happen gradually, first with people on the high-end margins of technical capability, then moving downwards until a curious high schooler can set it up for themselves and keep it with them, letting them stay out of the corporate cloud for most of their life more and more.
So, I hope someday that people can buy a box with a local AI tech support assistent which can make it even more accessible to set up a personal cloud. This will happen gradually, first with people on the high-end margins of technical capability, then moving downwards until a curious high schooler can set it up for themselves and keep it with them, letting them stay out of the corporate cloud for most of their life more and more.