That seems like a lot, but that's only ~8 months of usage. If you are doing consistent work with large models, or plan to for over a year, then it makes sense to at least have some hardware.

Something people forget too is that if you have no Nvidia GPUs at all locally, you'll need to spend an significant amount of time installing a new node, copying data, and debugging in your cloud instance, each time you want to do something, while being charged for it. It's a pretty big boost in terms of my time to develop locally and then scale to the cloud once something smaller scale is working.