Its interesting, there was a VFX company that was called Atomic Fiction, that worked on Looper, Sully and a few other big budget films. They were entirely cloud based.

in about 2014 it did look like everything was going to the cloud. Upgrading a render farm takes mega bucks($1-4 million for a large company) so converting that to a pay-and-go solution looked interesting financially.

A lot of high end "live" editing/colour correcting is done remotely, because the machines are too noisy to have in the same room. (obviously 10ms lag is trivial compared to 45 plus loss)

I think the thing that stopped the cloud rollout was how revisions are made. A scene in a film typically will be priced based on the number of people hours the company thinks it'll take +x%. However a film _producer_ will demand n number of revisions to change things. Those are normally not charged for.

So if you have your own compute, it only costs you staff and power. _but_ if you are pay and go, it also costs you CPU rental as well.

I think you are right, I suspect that at some point either Amazon, or more likely google are going to start giving away software with CPU time. (something like https://www.zyncrender.com/)