On "runpod community cloud" renting a 5090 costs $0.69/hour [1] and it consumes about $0.10/hour electricity, if running at full power and paying $0.20/kWh.
On Amazon, buying a 5090 costs $3000 [2]
That's a payback time of 212 days. And Runpod is one of the cheaper cloud providers; for the GPUs I compared, EC2 was twice the price for an on-demand instance.
Rental prices for GPUs are pretty darn high.
[1] https://www.runpod.io/pricing [2] https://www.amazon.com/GIGABYTE-Graphics-WINDFORCE-GV-N5090G...
A 5090 gaming card is a different beast to the 80gb ai cards. That one was 40k usd so for renting that to hit 1.50 dollar per hour is interesting.