How are y’all stomaching the “AI Boom” prices?

I am in the middle of considering an upgrade to my Home Server. I want to get a decent GPU for LocalAI. I mean, I have an RTX 3060 TI 16GB, I know that is much more than most people have, but even though it has a lot of cram the bus width is really slowing it down - I get ~23 tok/s on Gemma 4 26b A4B.

I want to get something that will allow me to comfortably run decent local models so I don’t have to rely on cloud models anymore. I also don’t need anything fancy. Qwen 3.6 27b seems like it was ~6 months behind vs frontier models at that size. It’s no doubt that progress will continue.

However, the big AI “boom“ is inflating all of these GPU prices. I need slightly over the amount of vram I have to run the models I want. The cheapest being the Intel Arc B60, but apparently the support for that is atrocious. The next best thing is the Rx 7900 XT, and then pretty much nothing under $1,000. Which, is a lot of money, for something that seems like an entry into this space.

How much are you spending on your rigs? Is getting these top-spec cards the only way to get useable models for daily/complex use? I’m just worried that I would be paying top “AI tax” that would probably go down quickly, but at the same time production seems it will be up for years now.