一批快速增长的初创公司从云公司租赁算力再转售，自身在AI芯片上不花一分钱，如今它们正处在十字路口。由于越来越难凑够足够的算力来服务客户，一些公司开始购买自己的芯片，这很可能大幅改变其业务的成本结构。
The fast-growing crop of startups that lease computing capacity from cloud firms and then resell it, without spending a nickel on their own AI chips, are at a crossroads. Finding it harder to line up enough computing capacity to serve their customers, some are starting to buy their own chips, which is likely to drastically change the economics of their business.
获取足够算力的困难也促使其中一些初创公司转向数十家规模较小的新型云服务商寻找计算资源，这些服务商往往比微软Azure、亚马逊云服务和谷歌云平台等大型超大规模云厂商拥有更多可用容量。本周有关Fireworks遭黑客攻击的消息凸显了这种做法的风险。Fireworks是这些初创公司中最知名的之一。
The difficulty in getting enough compute also has pushed some of these startups to look for computational resources from dozens of smaller neoclouds, which tend to have more available capacity than larger hyperscalers such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform. News this week of a hack of Fireworks, one of the best known of these startups, highlights the risk of that approach.