The same H100 costs $2.69 or $12.29 an hour depending where you rent it

You are completely mad if you are running any kind of valuable workload on Runpod community or Vast. Hosts are absolutely peeking inside the VM's (you can see it openly discussed in their Discords).

One thing that I'm not seeing mentioned very frequently is that it's really hard to actually get the GPUs that hyperscalers advertise depending on your region, use of cloud credits etc.

On Azure if you have credits (even hundreds of thousands of USD of credits through programmes like MSFT for startups) you just can't get any GPU quota in any region, even if you beg and plead with support reps. Even if you have cash it's often difficult to get any of the cheaper cards. You can forget about spot instances etc because the regions are essentially all at 100% capacity.

I've heard on other hyperscalers that it's also challenging.

This is super chilling for anything other than GenAI inference/training because if you have some more traditional workload that requires GPUs (traditional ML, other kinds of modelling) you're SOL.

There are a couple of new indices out there.

[1] "Silicon Index". Built against pricing observations, including listed prices and transaction data.

[2] "Ornn Compute Price Index (OCPI)". Claiming to use only executed transactions.

Your mileage may vary, but I find these new indices to be quite compelling.

[1] https://www.silicondata.com/products/silicon-index

[2] https://data.ornn.com/

And yup, its not just how much these resources cost, but how much people are willing to pay for them.

(edit: formatting)

Oh god I dealt with this recently while training my own 1B model.

Runpod - mostly okay, except sometimes instances get dropped on smaller ones. Prices float around 3.20 mostly for H100s. Cheaper ones exist but are PCIe. Best DX out of the bunch honestly (well, AX, as my agent was the one dealing with it). Didn't end up doing the 1B run on it, but did 100M+ runs and some minor experimental ones. Great for agentic exploration, "RSI", minor training loops and research.

Vast.ai - a bit pricier for the same H100s and it didn't have any clusters. So I could at best split my workload across 2-3 different H100s and spend time syncing. Not worth it.

Akash - since I'm trying to stay in a reasonable budget, I decided to try Akash, which was the worst experience out of all. Cards would be "available" but would never respond to your request. After trying to contact support via Discord, I got dozens of fake support accounts adding me to scam discords and asking for my wallet key. Support answered after a while, but without a real answer.

Mithril.ai - Ended up using this one, while it seems quite startupy, the actual offer is nice, it was easy to get going and they offer quite cheap H100s, offering singles and clusters.

Tbh while Skypilot is great, the marketplace fragmentation is leaving room open for a openrouter-like compute provider.

> 4.57× between cheapest and dearest, for the same chip

> What the 4.57× is not

> - InfiniBand

> - A datacentre SLA

> - Enterprise compliance, committed capacity...

ok

This is premise for https://skypilot.ai/, right? Cloud provider arbitrage.

There’s much more data here, with more providers and splits by the different H100 types: https://cloud-gpus.com/nvidia-h100/

I tried the TensorDock, which now offers H100 "from $2.25/hr", two years ago. The SSD IO was terrible, maybe oversold. My training workers was stuck at loading the dataset and cannot fully utilize the GPU.

The spread is indeed very big.

Lowest $1.90/hr Average $7.08/hr Median $7.91/hr

https://gpus.skypilot.co/?gpu=H100&count=8

I've only used Modal.com -- They give you $30 month of usage free. Otherwise, $3.95/hr for an H100 SXM5.

Yes. And the prices a lot of times don’t even make sense

I’ve run into many hosted GPUs with processes stuck, with outdated drivers/libraries, or poor Internet connections

Speaking of Runpod.io GPU availability, it is definitely increased in the past 6 months, getting 80Gb+ vram on demand takes few mins (not 5-6 hours like it used to be) at 1-3 usd an hour rate ... which made me thought a week ago - finally GPU bubble peak arrived

Another thought - i want to audit the actual usage of GPU like actual efficient inference time not billed one without relying on "trust me bro" billing. Especially on AWS. Had no trust issue with Runpod.io

Any effective inference audit ideas are appreciated

lol watch the $12 people just subcontract out to the $2 and hope no one notices lolll

I guess the author hasn't discovered vast.ai which is a minefield.

These prices don't seem real. For me, runpod is 8.99 an hour for b300 right now.

Nice that they clearly explained why it is different

I wish there was some kind of GPU marketplace so one could just arb this opportunity.

But a ps5.48xlarge has 8x H100s. Are the other options here comparable?

runpod is incredible, im a big fan, but good luck with availability on any specific GPU above 20gb of vram when you actually want to use it.

last time I was trying to run some workloads there the pricing of an h100 was largely irrelevant.

if they're all just an API away is anyone buying for 2.69 somewhere and then selling at 12.28 elsewhere arbitraging things?

I mean after the initial capex you’re just paying for electricity.

[flagged]

[flagged]

Seems once the government controls it the prices go haywire

Slop