Which APIs do you want to use? I'd be really surprised if there wasn't a way to do whatever-it-is in the cloud on Linux, with comparable speed and ease-of-development to macOS, at dramatically less cost and operational overhead. The M1 might be the only consumer device that has the relevant kind of hardware, but you don't particularly want a consumer device; you want a server. Macs aren't designed to be used as servers and come with a lot of onerous restrictions that make them difficult and expensive to use that way (designed to prevent cannibalization of Apple's consumer business). Media processing isn't an uncommon use case for cloud services, so it'd be surprising if accelerator hardware for that use case were available only in consumer devices—unless it's a use case that doesn't really benefit from specialized accelerator hardware, which would suggest that you don't need such hardware either.