This exceeds the computing requirements of most IT related companies, by far.
Cool, but nothing a single compute machine wouldn't get done with a bunch of VM's if learning and home workload are the focus.
This thing probably idles at a couple hundred watts.
Yea, but, like owning a car you soup up in your garage, it isn't about what you _need_, it's about what's fun and what's enough to give you something to do in your free time.
All good, as long as there is self-awareness that it's not built on a "need", but on a "want" basis.
It should be obvious to the reader that this is very much overkill, even for the stated goals of expandability and learning.
How do you know if it's overkill without knowing anything about what I am/will be running on it? Certainly, there are projects for which this setup might be appropriately sized, wouldn't you think?
Incidentally, this setup does leave me some significant headroom in terms of compute resources, but that's by design.
People don't usually buy this much compute for running a mail server or a media transcoder, so... probably AI? :)
If it's inference, don't expect great performance or cost-effectiveness.
But if you learn a lot during it, I wish you all the best!
If we're going with the car analogy, this is like buy 8 Miatas to keep in your driveway instead of combing all of the money into a single much faster car.
If the goal is to have a lot of something so you can play with many different things, this gets the job done. If the goal is high performance and maximum efficiency for learning or compute, a setup with dozens of smaller computers like this is usually not the optimal choice.