I paid $5000 for the workstation (2019) and upgraded to NVMe later, and I pay $0 for the datacenter because I have referred clients to their business and established a relationship over the years. Because when people find out how much cheaper it is to skip the cloud, they switch but don't know where to go.

I could upgrade to dual 2.5 GigE but I have nothing that needs that much bandwidth. I can download 30gb from hugging face in a few minutes which doesn't bother me.

The DC is about to onboard another client of mine, a startup that ran on AWS credits for 9 months. They are upgrading to a 64 core 2TB ram box that was an extra the DC had, for $3500, which will probably go into the rack next to mine.