Erik Bernhardsson, CEO of Modal, traces his path from building Spotify's recommendation system to founding a serverless GPU cloud, and explains how Modal aggregates demand, secures GPU capacity, weighs renting against owning, and sees agent sandboxes becoming a major product line.
A discussion of SemiAnalysis's ClusterMAX 3.0 ranking of managed GPU cloud providers, covering the evaluation criteria, the security problems found across neoclouds, the scarcity of compute as inference providers turn profitable, the strategic position of frontier labs that now resell compute, Nvidia's acquisitions of Poolside and Hugging Face, the separation between buyer-focused rankings and investment research, and the spread of heterogeneous silicon from Huawei and others.