alt Hacker NewsThe economies of scale gains are lost because you still have a middle man hosting provider who wants to profit too.
Over the long term it's always been better to buy than to rent, even if the renting option is technically more efficient on the GPUs, you don't have to pay some hosting providers profit margin.
If the hosting provider can fit 1000 users onto 100 GPUs, that's enough for quite nice margins and being far cheaper than buying your own GPU.
And for users that aren't running multiple agents 24/7, you should be able to fit a good user:GPU ratio.