Cloud TPUs in Beta
That $6.50/hr rate might be the big deal here. Amazon does offer instances with a V100 GPU (https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/on-demand/, the P3 instances), but if you're training something like ImageNet, you'll want the biggest image (p3.16xlarge) at $24.48/hr.Attaching a VM of similar power to a TPU on Google Compute Engine is much cheaper (https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing, n1-highmem-64, +$3.78/hr to the TPU cost for $10.28/hr total).Per recent benchmarks for training ImageNet (https://dawn.cs.stanford.edu/benchmark/), training ImageNet on a p3.16xlarge cost $358, when this post claims it'll cost less than $200. (EDIT: never mind; the benchmark uses ImageNet-152, and Google compares TPU performance against ImageNet-50) Interesting.