This is a very important observation. This is fundamentally about personal computing and the power to control the hardware and software we use for our work.
I recently reread "What The Dormouse Said", by John Markoff. Superb book that describes the tension between the developers of prototype personal computing on one side and distributed computing on the other. Interestingly, the need for distributed computing was motivated in part by early artificial intelligence research.
What we're seeing today IMO, is the reemergence of distributed computing. We saw it first with storage but we're now seeing it with compute itself. Given that excellent personal hardware has been available for several decades, it seems like madness to change course.