Hardware Bottlenecks: Are there any obvious weak points in this build for running full node operations and handling data-intensive tasks like blockchain analytics? I'm especially interested in potential memory or storage issues.
If your software (which perform analytic) could utilize GPU, you should know GT 1030 is old and low-end GPU. So you probably want to get something faster. More RAM could allow faster analytic since you could store more data on RAM rather than accessing it from the SSD.
Software: I plan to use Ubuntu Server. Is this a solid choice for running a full node and developing analytics tools, or are there other distributions better optimized for this kind of work?
By default, Ubuntu server doesn't include GUI. You probably want to use Ubuntu 24.04 LTS instead.
Future Expansion: I'm looking to scale this setup to handle machine learning models on the blockchain data in the future. Should I anticipate the need for more advanced GPUs or additional hardware as I expand the complexity of my models?
I don't know about machine learning or AI field, but your build should support 4 RAM and 2 GPU. And FWIW, marketplace which rent GPU or high-end computer exist.