If you have the hardware to run expensive models, is the cost of electricity much of a factor? According to Google, the average price in the Silicon Valley Area is $0.448 per kWh. An RTX 5090 costs about $4,000 and has a peak power consumption of 1000 W. Maxing out that GPU for a whole year would cost $3,925 at that rate. It's not particularly more expensive than that hardware itself.

At that point it'd be cheaper to get an expensive subscription to a cloud platform AI product. I understand the case for local LLMs but it seems silly to worry about pricing for cloud-based offerings but not worry about pricing for locally run models. Especially since running it locally can often be more expensive

Apple silicon is crazy efficient as well as being comparable to GPUs in performance for max and ultra chips.

for almost the entire year, yes.