It makes sense when someone else is paying for the power. The AI capabilities of mobile cpus is for pushing cloud based AI to your device. You pay the power bill while retaining the same lack of privacy as cloud hosted AI.

I'm pretty sure the company that owns the compute is the one paying for the power. Who would agree to have an ugly noisy cube in their property that they have to pay maintenance for? What would they get out of that deal?

Yeah, the usual approach here is to offer a free VPN service, and then piggyback traffic over the user’s internet provider. Much, much more scalable and cheaper than offering to put GPUs at a user’s home.

Wow, that's genius. Basically, user gets a VPN but so does provider, in a sense.

You can offer them a free anything, really. It's a pretty convenient way to pay, that mostly doesn't affect the user at all (unless their connection is very slow), but generates value.

"value"

Yes, it does. Just because the value is for someone else and not you, that doesn't make it any less real.