TCO: Buy vs Rent

Whether to buy GPUs or rent them is a utilization question dressed as a finance question. An owned H100 costs a few tens of thousands of dollars up front and a known amount per hour in power, cooling, space and operations; a rented one costs a few dollars per hour and nothing when idle. The break-even is the utilization at which the owned hourly cost, amortized over the hardware's useful life, equals the rental rate. This page builds the owned cost from parts, works the break-even, and adds the terms the simple model leaves out: depreciation risk, reserved discounts, and the price of idle capacity.