One odd thing about AI equipment is that it’s very expensive to buy and very cheap to rent. Want an Nvidia B200 GPU accelerator? Buying one on its release in late 2024 would’ve probably cost around $50,000, which is before all the costs associated with plugging it in and switching it on. Yet by early 2025, the same hardware could be rented for around $3.20 an hour. By last month, the B200’s floor price had fallen to $2.80 per hour. Nvidia upgrades its chip architecture every other year, so there’s an opportunity for the best-funded data centre operators to lock in customers with knockdown prices on anything that’s not cutting edge. From the outside, the steady decline in GPU rental rates resembles the kind of predatory price war the tech industry relies upon: burn money until all your competitors are dead. The evidence, however, is more complicated. … among the hyperscalers — Amazon’s AWS, Microsoft’s Azure, Google and Oracle — prices have hardly budged. The result is an ever-widening gap between rates charged by the big-four and a growing number of smaller rivals.