'for AI and ML' is not really a lot to go by, it can vary significantly. if hes gonna need larger ram on the GPU anyway most dedicated cards in your price range wont do and he would need to use the cloud anyway. so either save money now and get cheaper but decent device that will last throughout his course. or
A new ARM mac with (16+ GB of ram )would also be great too as its portable , has excellent battery, build and good enough performance to run slight larger models (albeit slower), unless your cousins curriculum involves many windows only applications and tools which should run fine one VMs but is an extra step.
i personally use Macbook pro M3 pro 18gb and have no issues running Power-BI and Excel in VMware. Though at home i remote into my windows desktop instead of running on the VM as powerbi has no native arm version yet, so its slightly smoother on the desktop.
