Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin confirmed that the hardware boom in local AI has unexpectedly solved one of Ethereum's main infrastructure problems: the high cost of hardware for end users. His own Geth node occupies just 461 GiB after pruning, and high-performance workstations for AI already exceed the technical requirements for blockchain nodes. Thanks to EIP-4444 and snap sync optimizations, a full node can now be synchronized in about 12 hours, with disk requirements falling below 0.5 TB.