GPU at $2.25/HR or $12.29/HR: The Infrastructure Layer That Determines Price

The 9x price spread on H100 is real but the comparison requires some care. The $1.38/hr end is typically reserved or committed capacity. The $12.29/hr end is on demand at major cloud providers with full flexibility premium built in.

The more meaningful comparison is 3-year TCO for a team running consistent utilization. At 85% utilization on 1,000 GPUs, dedicated colocated infrastructure in a secondary market typically runs 40-60% of equivalent cloud cost after accounting for all non-compute costs. That range depends on your internal ops overhead and financing cost.

The silicon itself is 20-25% of total cost at scale. The rest is infrastructure, power, networking, ops, and overhead. That's why facility location matters more than people expect.