I just asked Gemini to estimate run costs for a local GLM-5.2 instance, something that a team of a few software engineers might use the way they are using Cursor today… power budget is 6KW, which around here - after facility cooling costs - works out around $1000 per month. Our Cursor subscriptions have $100 per month price tags on them for the developers who use them most extensively, and this $100K to buy in $1K per month to run local instance isn’t likely to serve more than a dozen engineers efficiently. Even if you can lease it out at full utilization 24 hours a day, it doesn’t sound like much of a money printing machine to me, yet.
My $20/month home subscription to Claude? Even less so.
Economies of scale… And you said instance, which is AWS terminology… If you have the scale and the expertise to run a DC efficiently, expect significant savings. We pay a premium for opex over capex.
I just asked Gemini to estimate run costs for a local GLM-5.2 instance, something that a team of a few software engineers might use the way they are using Cursor today… power budget is 6KW, which around here - after facility cooling costs - works out around $1000 per month. Our Cursor subscriptions have $100 per month price tags on them for the developers who use them most extensively, and this $100K to buy in $1K per month to run local instance isn’t likely to serve more than a dozen engineers efficiently. Even if you can lease it out at full utilization 24 hours a day, it doesn’t sound like much of a money printing machine to me, yet.
My $20/month home subscription to Claude? Even less so.
Economies of scale… And you said instance, which is AWS terminology… If you have the scale and the expertise to run a DC efficiently, expect significant savings. We pay a premium for opex over capex.