Lab Budget Spreadsheets Are Rewriting Wall Street's Compute Wars

When I first joined the lab, my advisor told me to read a paper on distributed training efficiency. After spending three days on it, I noticed a strange phenomenon: almost all the experiments in the paper used 'sufficient' GPU resources—hundreds or even thousands of them. Yet the acknowledgments section often stated, 'Thanks to [Cloud Platform Name] for providing computational support.' I immediately wondered how much money these cloud platforms were actually spending behind the scenes to buy equipment. Isn't this essentially the same thing as labs applying for funding to purchase servers?