Public cloud supernodes: Who is Alibaba Cloud building a ladder for?

Last week I met up with a friend who's running an AI startup. His team just trained a model to trillion-parameter scale, but they can't bring down the inference costs. He complained that building their own cluster would take half a year, renting GPUs has insufficient bandwidth, and the model doesn't fit on a single machine. I casually mentioned, 'It'd be great if the cloud could give you a complete supernode.' Well, today Alibaba Cloud announced exactly that.