Our main compute doesn't go towards machine learning, but we do rely heavily on GPU power. I recently had to come up with the figures for us to invest in an expansion of our compute power, and it turned out that buying the machines ourselves would be cheaper than renting them from Google in 3-4 months.

We don't run on those fancy V100 cards though, just regular old gaming cards suffice, and I suppose if we bought the "industrial" nvidia versions it would a take a bit longer to recoup, but still definitely within the year.

Anyway what I'm saying is that it's probably possible to to this a lot cheaper than 36M, though maybe not in such a short time. Our startup is extremely cash intensive, and I bet machine learning companies are as well (I suppose machine learning experts aren't cheap ;)), so if we can put in some work and safe a big portion off our hardware costs that really goes the distance.