Yeah might be. I've only seen companies do machine learning in two ways. On is to rent a cluster of gpus and train something big for a week or two to explore something interesting. The other use pattern is to retrain a model every week with fresh data. Maybe this is the case for OP. Retraining a model each week and serving that model with some cloud platform. It makes sense to build a dedicated instance for a reoccuring tasks if you know that there is a need for it for more than a year. I guess it is also cheaper than using the upfront payment option in aws.