I'm sure they will keep hardware exorbitantly expensive for as long as possible to push ppl to the subscription model. I would love to run local models, but the cost of hardware versus performance is too high compare to cloud at this point in time. I might break even in 5-10 years, but the hardware may be out of date by then. I hope things will level out in a few years. And I agree the us gov will try to ban non-us models and hardware. They may even bail out the ai companies because they will be too big to fail. Also expect ai and robot companies to get massive military contracts.