What one hour of GPU time costs, tracked across spot marketplaces,
GPU clouds and the hyperscalers.
Rates as of August 26, 2026
Renting an H100 for an hour cost $6.62 in
the second half of 2023. By July 2025 it cost
$2.79, a fall of 58% in under two years. Then it stopped.
Across the 10 monthly prints from July 2025 to
April 2026, the benchmark held inside a
$2.79 to $2.90 band. The crash in compute prices is over, and what
replaced it is not a recovery but a plateau.
$2.82
H100 benchmark rate, the most recent monthly print
-57%
since the second half of 2023, peak to latest
10
consecutive monthly prints inside a 4% band
4.2×
cheapest venue to most expensive, same chip, same day
Time window
The fall, and the floor it found
A single blended benchmark rate for the H100, the chip that has been the
industry's unit of account since 2023.
Published by SemiAnalysis, quarterly through mid-2025 and monthly after.
Points are placed at the midpoint of the period they cover. The most recent print
available covers April 2026; nothing has been published since.
Benchmark prints in this window
The same chip, five prices
There is no single price for an H100 hour. There is a spread, and it is
wide enough to swamp any trend inside it.
The most recent day inside the selected window. Spot marketplaces let owners
of idle hardware undercut everyone, so they set the floor. Hyperscaler list rates sit at
the top and move rarely. A rate quoted without naming its venue is close to meaningless.
Where the floor has been moving
The four venues that publish often enough to track daily.
The marketplace median is the noisy line: it is a median of live listings, so a
handful of machines appearing or leaving moves it several percent. The clearing price
drifts slowly and the advertised cloud median barely moves. Treat the flat green line with
suspicion rather than as evidence of a stable market — it has printed $2.71 to the
cent on every day of the record, which is more likely a feed serving a cached value than a
market that has not moved.
Daily rates by venue
Nine days is not a trend
Every accelerator tracked, with its rate at the end of the window and how far
it moved inside it. Read the levels, not the percentages.
Why the percentages are unreliable. The daily record runs from
August 18, 2026, which is far too short to be a trend, and the underlying numbers
are medians of live listings rather than settled trades. Sampled every three hours over the
same period, the H100 median ranged from $1.87 to $6.35 —
a 3.4× spread with no news behind it. Where a chip has fewer than ten listings, one
machine moves the median and the figure is marked accordingly.
Daily rates by accelerator
What the noise actually looks like
The H100 marketplace median, captured every three hours.
Each point is a real median of real listings. None of these swings is a price
signal; they are what a thin, continuously relisted market looks like when you sample it
often. Every capture in this window
How to read all of this
Three things are worth carrying away. The long decline is real and it is finished:
the benchmark rate fell 58% into July 2025 and has
moved less than 4% in any direction since. The venue matters more than the
date: on a single day the same chip clears at $1.88 on a spot market and lists at
$7.89 at a hyperscaler, a gap far larger than any month-to-month move. And daily
marketplace prints are noise until many more of them accumulate; the benchmark series
exists precisely because a median of live listings, on its own, cannot tell you anything.
The newest accelerators are the ones worth watching from here. Their rates are set on thin
books by early adopters, so they move first and they move hardest — B200 rates have already
moved -18% across this short record while the older parts sat still.
A note on the axis. When you narrow the window far enough that a series barely moves, the
vertical scale holds open to roughly six per cent either side of its own level rather than
stretching to fill the frame. A flat stretch is meant to look flat. The range actually in
view is printed under every chart.