Do the leg work and provide your manager options with a clear recommendation, with costs. That could be hardware purchase, cloud options in GCP or AWS for a PoC

Do the leg work and provide your manager options with a clear recommendation, with costs. That could be hardware purchase, cloud options in GCP or AWS for a PoC short and longer term. Start small and build from it. Then look to standardize where and how you do ML. This sounds like a good opportunity to greenfield ML and create something new.