Thanks, reading through it now!

I don't know your situation but my suggestion is, if you are really interested in deep learning, get hired by a company that does it.

Deep learning is a hot topic right now and if you have any aptitude in that direction you will get hired very quickly.

Deep learning is hot in that everyone wants to do it. But very few companies use it (Google, Facebook come to mind). It's still mostly in research labs and academia.

It would be nice but as a absolute rookie in this space I think it will take a while before that happens :)

One benefit of using cloud GPUs is the ability to train multiple models simultaneously. This is difficult to do with your own hardware at a reasonable cost, especially since a large portion of your time will be spent on hyperparameter tuning.

While you're getting started with your own hardware I'd love it if you could share any feedback on something we've been building[0] as far as cloud training goes. It's currently in free public beta and works directly with TensorFlow models so there's no lock-in.

[0] https://fomoro.com (jim at fomoro.com)