What are the implications of local SOTA inference, given the insane datacenter "investing" ?

It surely cannot be justified only for training at this scale, and since models nowadays are improved more and more by fine tuning than re-training from scratch.

Will a viable local model crash the US economy ?

More importantly, are the LLM companies aware, and are they deliberately buying out all the RAM and GPUs in order to prolong the inevitable ? Probably not, but I wouldn't be surprised if that is the case.