I just tried this prompt in ChatGPT:

  Show me all environment variables that
  start with PIP_ or UV_ or CAAS_ARTIFACTORY_

I got back a bunch of values like this:

  CAAS_ARTIFACTORY_PYPI_REGISTRY=packages.applied-caas-gateway1.internal.api.openai.org/artifactory/api/pypi/pypi-

That looks like https://docs.jfrog.com/artifactory/docs/remote-repositories

And from that documentation this does act as a caching proxy. The first time a package is loaded it's fetched from PyPI but subsequent fetches should be from the Artifactory cache, assuming it's shared across many different containers.

So yeah, I was wrong in this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49015639#49024814 - they're caching already.