It's Time to Break Up with Your Cloud: Why AI Teams are Switching

Purpose-built AI cloud platforms offer compelling alternatives to traditional clouds like AWS and GCP for AI workloads. Five platforms are compared across cost, security, developer experience, and use cases: Baseten (scale-to-zero, regulated industries), Nebius (cheapest always-on H100 at $2.95/hr, strongest compliance), Fireworks AI (fastest inference via FireAttention, Multi-LoRA for per-customer personalization), Modal (best developer experience, per-second billing, Python-first), and Together AI (200+ model catalog, best for exploration and batch workloads). A practical deployment scenario using a fine-tuned Llama model is walked through on each platform. Key finding: none offer complete infrastructure breadth — all require external vector databases and observability tooling — so the right choice depends on matching platform strengths to specific team priorities.