It is not getting easier to obtain hardware that can run models which are sufficiently useful to undercut frontier models, if anything the cost of such hardware has gone up by 25% or more just in the past 6 months.
I think hardware prices will come back down once we start seeing more efficiency improvements in models and hardware, and once more people and companies self-host models (which seems to be happening more and more these days). I think the massive infra/hardware expenditures of OpenAI and the like are going to end up unnecessary, leading to hardware price drops.
If companies decide to self-host, wouldn't that drive the demand and therefore prices up? Most companies currently do not have the needed infrastructure.
I think companies will self host (including on rented hardware) even if it's more expensive, and that, along with efficiency improvements, will drop demand for big AI. I think big AI is overspending on hardware/datacenters at the moment.