Back-of-envelope math: local AI on M5 Ultra pays back in 9 months vs 4 on NVIDIA
JosephJacks_ · x · 2026-11-15
liuliu quantifies how bad local AI economics is: assuming DeepSeek 4.1 Flash 1017 ($0.15/M input, $0.6/M output tokens), an M5 Ultra ($12k for 256GiB) at a conservative 4000 tok/s prefill and 80 tok/s decode earns about $45.36/day at a 9:1 token ratio.
That's a 9-month payback — still worse than NVIDIA hardware, which recoups the investment in under 4 months. Local AI remains clearly uneconomical vs cloud.
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