Weitzman: Renting an H100 GPU costs 1.5 times more than buying it
Cliff Weitzman · How to Build Your Own Data Center & Why Every Startup Should Do It · Sep 5, 2026 · at 2:50
Cliff Weitzman, CEO of Speechify, contrasts the annual cloud rental rates for NVIDIA H100 GPUs across GCP, AWS, and Azure with outright hardware purchase costs.
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“If I was to buy an H 100 for, let's say, 30,000 dollars, that's how much the, kind of, a single card would cost. If I wanted to rent an H 100 for one hour spot instance from GCP, it could cost me five dollars. If I rented it from, like, You know, Azure or AWS, maybe it'll cost me 3.5 dollars per hour. So if I multiply that times 24 hours and then times three 65 days in a year, I'm actually going to end up paying 35,000 to 50,000 dollars to rent that GPU for one year, but I could buy it for 30,000 dollars. So it's 1.5 X the cost of owning the hardware to rent the hardware for a year.”
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