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.

Electricity burned is the same. But so is the electricity burned while gaming, your system is limited by your GPU in both instances. If you have an RTX 5090 then you can throw almost 600 watts continuous at both which could use like 14kW/day, but most people will have more modest hardware, and therefore the energy usage of running a local model wouldn’t be all that much either - I don’t think many people limit their gaming because of how much the electricity would cost.

But when you have a datacenter with hundreds of servers capable of maxing out the residential house mains of half a dozen houses each (single NVIDIA NVL72 AI server has 72 GPUs and uses 120-150kW at full load) they can throw way, way more compute at you than you ever could manage locally.