Cloud AI
Definition
AI services and infrastructure provided through cloud computing platforms, allowing organizations to access GPU clusters, pre-trained models, and managed AI services without owning hardware.
Cloud AI democratizes access to artificial intelligence by offering compute, storage, and pre-built AI services on demand. Major providers include AWS (SageMaker, Bedrock), Google Cloud (Vertex AI), Microsoft Azure (Azure AI), and specialized GPU cloud providers like CoreWeave and Lambda Labs. Cloud AI services range from low-level GPU rental to high-level APIs for text generation, image recognition, and speech processing. Model-as-a-Service offerings from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google let developers call frontier models via API without managing any infrastructure. Cloud AI is essential for training large models (which require hundreds of GPUs) and provides elastic scaling for inference workloads. The trade-offs include ongoing costs, data privacy concerns, vendor lock-in, and latency compared to on-premises deployment.
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