Long answer: We own a substantial amount of compute ourselves, as far as Singapore where we have fully-owned hardware at Equinix SG1. We started with our own crypto mining operation just outside of Boston, but as wholesale consumers approached us in 2020 due to pandemic surges, we added business internet and power backups. Suddenly we were operating a rudimentary "office data center." Two large reseller sites sell on our fully-owned hardware. Boston's electric costs are very high ($0.23/kWh), so we're gradually moving more hardware to tier 3/4 data centers that are cheaper on a per-unit basis.
But, we partner with 3rd parties too (4 large scale 1000+ GPU operators each to be exact) to resell their compute. This is also how we'll enter Europe... we're working closely with an existing supplier that colocates servers at Hydro66 in Sweeden and another at Scaleway Paris. We provide the software, they provide the hardware, and we pay them a special rate based on the volume we're doing. Partnering with others is the only way we can handle large scale without insanely high capex costs (that being said, we do get preferential pricing as an NVIDIA Inception Program member, which we take advantage of for our own fully-owned hardware).
We have a doc in it here: https://docs.tensordock.com/infrastructure/reservable-instan...
We're also working on a marketplace (client site: https://www.tensordock.com/product-marketplace, host site: https://www.tensordock.com/host). We expect a beta version to be up and running in the next ~2 weeks. With this, we'll have a script that hosts will use to install a small version of OpenStack. Then, they set prices, and customers can deploy directly on that hardware. By aggregating all these hosts together on the same marketplace, we hope we can slash the price of compute.
So far, owning our own hardware has allowed us to negotiate better rates and enter markets where previous services don't exist (namely, Singapore, where we sell subscription servers with 1070 GeForce cards for $150/month — unheard of pricing for an APAC city). Eventually, we hope there'll be suppliers in every city selling on our marketplace or core cloud product so that we can really become the #1 place for ML startups to provision compute. In a way, we want to be the Amazon of cloud computing. Amazon, in a way, created a global marketplace. Yes, they sell their own products, but they also sell others' products. By doing so, you know that you're getting a good deal on whatever you buy. We want to end up being the same thing for compute, but that's still a few years off :)
TL;DR - we own a lot of hardware, and we resell a lot of hardware. But in the future, we want to focus on the reselling aspect to truly be able to nail the user experience and handle demand surges while maintaining low costs.