As a rule of thumb the energy use to produce a silicon wafer is roughly equal to the energy it will use in its lifetime. For GPU and VRAM this is considerable. To equip yourself with the capability to run an LLM locally is making an upfront investment in the production of extremely toxic and resource intensive products.

Why buy a personal EV with 600 mile range that sits idle 95% of the time when you can take a bus (aka the cloud) that maximizes the resource utilization?