Why AI Compute Comes in Rectangles — Erik Bernhardsson, Modal CEO

Modal provides critical AI infrastructure, offering compute and storage platforms that enable developers to build and scale AI applications efficiently. The platform’s growth is anchored in its ability to manage complex GPU capacity, shifting from reliance on spot instances to securing multi-year commitments across twenty-five different cloud providers to meet surging demand. Beyond core functions, the introduction of sandboxes has become a significant revenue driver, facilitating ephemeral, isolated environments for code execution and reinforcement learning. As the AI landscape evolves, the focus remains on creating modular, general-purpose building blocks that simplify infrastructure, allowing developers to focus on application logic. By integrating forward-deployed engineers and leveraging AI agents for defensive cybersecurity and internal testing, the company maintains a lean, high-leverage model that prioritizes developer experience and operational resilience in an increasingly hardware-constrained market.