But I think this is backwards. I remember 4-5 years ago waiting for AWS and GCP to schedule us an 8GPU machine (gcp had 16 even) for hours while paying them crazy rents for the GPUs that paid the hardware in 2 months of usage. This while components and servers were actually cheap.

The hyperscalers are monopolies that eventually some admin will grow balls and will have to break up. But this is wishful thinking and nVidia didn't do a bad job working them around. Now with other monopolies drying out components like RAM from the market, one can actually rent GPUs with less effort from neoclouds.