I agree. When a couple of developers can start a software company with nothing but a credit card and an AWS account the concept of "capital" has changed a lot.

I have a feeling this idea is deceptive. Renting equipment has existed time immemorial.

Well, personally, I could set up a few cheap servers in my office and take advantage of my gigabit internet up/down while I'm bootstrapping and then get a colo. The point being that the main capital today is intellectual not physical.

What part of that is renting

The outlay for infrastructure. Previously you had to own your own hardware, get a business class line, maintain it, etc. Now you just rent servers from AWS or another provider. I like to think of it like a ski rental. They build a few extra services on top to make it even more convenient, but the critical part is the hardware.

The owner of ski rental, unless or is massively profitable, if it is the sole critical income source, is textbook petit bourgeois.

The main difference is in influence wielded...

The part where a credit card is involved. It's not directly renting equipment, it's renting money to buy the equipment in anticipation of earning new money to replace the rented money, but it's isomorphic to renting equipment, which is rather the central point to the idea of capital as marketable goods rather than entailed property (or, commonly, an appurtenance to entailed land) which distinguishes capitalism from feudalism.