The data center is still needed, just not the same scale. You don’t run “small” local models to compete with Claude’s size. They don’t publish numbers, but estimates were like 1-2T params for the models like early Opus. You need a lot of hardware to run those efficiently at a scale an enterprise would need.

Or they just spent enough to upgrade developer desktops with RTX Pro’s to run quantized ~100B param models at their desks. Those are very good for coding.