M5 Ultra Local AI Costs at the Actual Launch Price

Holy. Mac Studio M5 Ultra with 512GB is out for $22,299.

Is it ready for a local home AI lab? I compared it to OpenRouter prices.

I guessed it would land around $15–17k. The real price makes the math a lot worse.

What it costs to run a proper open-weight model at home:

DeepSeek V4 Pro: 2 Macs, $44.6k

Kimi K3.1 Pro and GLM-5.3: 4 Macs, $89.2k

At 100 output tokens/sec, 24/7, compared with OpenRouter prices today, the hardware payback would be:

Kimi K3.1 Pro: 34 months

DeepSeek V4 Pro: 51 months

GLM-5.3: 78 months

My earlier comparison using estimated prices