Your GPU bill says $10,000.
Your actual cost: $25,000–$65,000.
Here's the math most teams aren't doing.
A 72-hour H100 wait shows up as $0 on the invoice. No GPU-hours, nothing billed. Looks free.
But your ML team just burned $5,400+ in salary sitting idle.
Your fine-tune slipped 3 days. Your investor demo got pushed. Your competitor ran 30% more experiments this quarter because their compute didn't queue.
None of this is on the invoice. But all of it hits the business.
It's time to stop asking "what's the per-GPU rate" and start focusing on "what unavailability costs."
https://io.net/blog/what-happens-when-you-cant-get-a-gpu-the-hidden-cost-of-cloud-wait-times
Your actual cost: $25,000–$65,000.
Here's the math most teams aren't doing.
A 72-hour H100 wait shows up as $0 on the invoice. No GPU-hours, nothing billed. Looks free.
But your ML team just burned $5,400+ in salary sitting idle.
Your fine-tune slipped 3 days. Your investor demo got pushed. Your competitor ran 30% more experiments this quarter because their compute didn't queue.
None of this is on the invoice. But all of it hits the business.
It's time to stop asking "what's the per-GPU rate" and start focusing on "what unavailability costs."
https://io.net/blog/what-happens-when-you-cant-get-a-gpu-the-hidden-cost-of-cloud-wait-times