[joshuaellinger]

GPU servers and coloc are pretty cheap these days. $1K/m rent per 20A of power. ROI on hardware is usually 3-4 months max (ie - for the cost the machine at AWS for 3-4 months, you can buy the same thing).

Lead time might be a problem for you but you can probably do it in a under a month if you take available stock at your vendor. I work with a company called PogoLinux (http://pogolinux.com) out of Seattle and they sell boxes that have 4 GPUs in them.

That said -- the other advice is right. You can probably get by with a much simpler model. The coloc route would probably only be better if you are can't change the models due to people constraints and the ML stuff doesn't have a lot of AWS dependencies. SysAdmins are a lot easier to find and hire than ML specialists.