Cloud FPGAs sound awesome. I'm interested in computer vision and machine learning, specifically "deep learning" neural nets. The current state of the art in neural nets is GPU implementations, and I think it's the right time to start thinking about FPGAs and eventually ASICs.

For deep learning, high performance in a single machine is important, as it's very difficult to distribute learning across multiple machines in an efficient way. A more powerful machine can train a bigger network in the same amount of time, and a bigger network can learn more complex things, with no known upper bound.