Is foundational AI research still something that can be done without access to HPC? [D]

I'm not that well versed in ML yet. I know that "Attention is all you need" was based on work that was done with a couple of high end gaming GPUs at the time. I can afford that.

Suppose for arguments sake that I have caught up on ML such that I have the competence to recreate state of the art results should I have access to the required hardware, do I still need access to huge amounts of hardware infrastructure to be able to contribute to the field at a foundational level?