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You can help contribute - https://cloud.torproject.org/

Note that you can reduce your costs by using spot instances.

Do you have any sense how many nodes (or I guess how much bandwidth or even something else I'm not thinking of) it would take to make a material difference on the speed of the network?

I don't know, but you can monitor the status of the network here - http://torstatus.blutmagie.de/

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