I bought a 4x 2080Ti box from Lambda Labs a few years ago and am very happy with the purchase. It's powerful enough to train reasonably sized models, and I charge clients for the compute time at a rate slightly lower than what AWS or GCP would charge. I also mine ETH on it during downtime, and it's already more than paid itself off (I get "free" electricity from my commercial landlord.)
Finances aside, it's really nice being able to iterate locally on things like training/inference pipelines and model serving. My work is more toward the ML engineering space than it is research, so I don't spend much time in Colab.
Finances aside, it's really nice being able to iterate locally on things like training/inference pipelines and model serving. My work is more toward the ML engineering space than it is research, so I don't spend much time in Colab.