I'd cancel my internet, and never buy another computer before paying these absurd costs.

no thanks.. nothing on the internet is really worth those upfront costs anymore. companies have made the internet mostly trash, and they have also inflated the costs of the hardware required to unfathomable prices.

I have checked out and won't return until they either fix shit, or be charged for all their crimes.

My concern is, how does this look in 5 years' time? When your existing pc craps out and you absolutely need a new one? Prices don't go down. Will AI demand still be high? Or data center demand?

Will we have to get minimal, subscription-based hardware so we can connect to a cloud pc, owning nothing and forgoing any anonymity?

That's not a future I want.

Motherboards are relatively easy to manufacture and I suspect these AI datacenter builders plan to build their own with bus allocated specifically to the AI needs. RAM? Disk? Not so much… expensive to manufacture, requiring specific knowledge and not much to optimise.

So here we are

If AI has its way, general purpose computing will be kept deep behind a paywall and far from the hands of ordinary people.