> This homelab does seem compute focused, which might be right for OP but is normally a mistake that people make when they build their first homelab.

I kept waiting for the description of what it would be used for, but there was only a passing reference to learning how to run AI workloads.

For some people, buying and assembling hardware is the hobby. This gets old fast, especially when you add up how much was spent on hardware that's now sitting idle while it becomes more outdated year over year.

I agree that for typical learning cases the best solution is a single, cheap consumer CPU paired with a lot of RAM. For the $8000 spent on those 8 mini PCs, you could build a 256GB RAM box with 2 or even 3 nVidia 5090 GPUs and be in a different league of performance. It's also much easier to resell big nVidia consumer GPUs and recoup some of your money for the next upgrade.

It does look fun to assemble all of this into a rack and make it all work together. However, it's an extremely expensive means to an end. If you just want to experiment with distributed systems you can pair 128GB of RAM with a 16-core consumer CPU and run dozens or even 100 small VMs without issue. If you want to do GPU work you can even use PCIe passthrough to assign GPUs to VMs.