this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2026
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Why is that? The electricity burned is about the same, no? Of course, the impact is more distributed.
I think the difference would be that local machines aren't subsidized, so you'd see people get a lot more skittish after that first electric bill. Data centers are like railroad tracks from the railroad boom (if they'd made the rails out of licorice twizzlers.)
If you watch your PC grind to a halt generating 1 image over 5 minutes, it makes it less appealing to queue up 1,000 and cherry-pick the best; let alone making videos. It's too easy right now to use a ruinous amount of compute power for something stupid like a fake dog video without even realising the cost
With local you're limited in performance by the hardware you can buy, which is a huge up-front that most people would balk at. Hosted will give you as much performance as you could ever want billed by usage with several profit vectors built-in, but the customer sees smaller dollar number and better apparent performance and thinks they're getting a deal. Car dealerships do the same thing with selling the monthly payment and not the actual sticker price.
The environmental difference then could be significant. Users taking the hosted route can choose to use much more resource-intensive models than a local PC could. They might see a $300 AI bill as a little pricey when it is usually $100, but figure that's cheaper than buying a PC that could produce the same result, just at maybe half speed. This would result in a much higher energy cost from the hosted solution compared to the PC.