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What's happening to H100 rental prices? - by Neha Desaraju

squaretower.substack.com · 830 words · saved by 1 readers

Squaretower has been tracking the price of one of the most liquid parts of the AI infra stack, the Nvidia H100. On its own, the on-demand rental price of a single H100 hour is a useful metric for AI compute buyers to benchmark their spend and GPU cloud providers to better understand the market value of their capacity. But it’s also a useful proxy to understanding general market risk, reactivity, and reflexivity (through pricing volatility) and market sentiment for future GPU hours. We’ve studied H100 pricing in particular as a case study and model of for projecting cost trends of other chip types where less data exists, along with the effects of fluctuating supply and demand. Fundamentally, we bucket compute depreciation into two buckets, which have important distinctions. Actual hardware depreciation due to natural use resulting in lower efficiency or performance Price decline due to anticipation of supply and actual supply of newer generations or expansion of supply of the same gener

What's happening to H100 rental prices? Volatility spikes & increased demand adds to the GPU depreciation debate Dec 18, 2025 5 1 Share Squaretower has been tracking the price of one of the most liquid parts of the AI infra stack, the Nvidia H100. On its own, the on-demand rental price of a single H100 hour is a useful metric for AI compute buyers to benchmark their spend and GPU cloud providers to better understand the market value of their capacity. But it’s also a useful proxy to understanding general market risk, reactivity, and reflexivity (through pricing volatility) and market sentiment

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