Subscriptions have always been, and will always be, more economical and efficient than ownership.

Unless you're using a resource 100% of the time, that resource is partially wasted. A GPU can be much cheaper for you if others are allowed to use it when you're asleep.

I don't think this will ever work for gaming, as gaming has strict bandwidth and latency requirements. This means you need to colocate gaming datacenters with the people who actually use them, and people in a given timezone usually play at similar times.

LLMs are a completely different beast. The user experiences of using an LLM next door and using an LLM from across the world are basically indistinguishable. This means you can have a single datacenter with really high GPU utilization during the day.