the compute would happen on your machine if you were running duckdb locally.
And yes, to get more compute, you'd want to spin up a VM.
What's cool is you can do both (run locally for small stuff, run on VM for heavy workloads).
so in other words we could replace snowflake/bigquery with this solution and get pretty much the same performance?
it depends... but yes, you could likely set it up in a way that matches (or beats) snowflake performance.