Originally published on AI Tech Connect.
In the first half of 2023, if you wanted to train or fine-tune a model seriously, you queued for H100s at above $8 per hour on the spot market — and you were grateful to get them. Demand from the post-ChatGPT frenzy had stripped every major cloud of available capacity. Startups ran waitlists. Infrastructure teams competed with hyperscalers on a thin inventory of Ampere and early Hopper chips. The cost of experimentation was high enough that it meaningfully constrained which teams could afford to build. Two years later, that world is gone. H100 and H200 on-demand rental has settled at approximately $2.00–$2.50 per hour across major cloud providers, per SpendArk analysis published in May 2026. That is not a temporary dip — it is the result of a structural supply surge that has been building…
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