Why building your own Deep Learning Computer is 10x cheaper than AWS

The machine I built costs $3k and has the parts shown below. There's one 1080 Ti GPU to start (you can just as easily use the new 2080 Ti for Machine Learning at $500 more -- just be careful to get one with a blower fan design), a 12 Core CPU, 64GB RAM, and 1TB M.2 SSD. You can add three more GPUs easily for a total of four. Assuming your 1 GPU machine depreciates to $0 in 3 years (very conservative), the chart below shows that if you use it for up to 1 year, it'll be 10x cheaper, including costs for electricity. Amazon discounts pricing if you have a multi-year contract, so the advantage is 4–6x for multi-year contracts.