The same H100, six different prices, and the most expensive one is the default. A tour of everything wrong with hyperscaler GPU billing.
Hot Takes
Short, sharp, arguableThey mock the tokens in public and rent the GPUs in private. Follow the purchase orders, not the press releases.
Deep Dives
Long-form breakdownsFrom FLOPs to final invoice: what a training run actually costs when you count idle time, failures and egress — not just the brochure rate.
Subsidized supply is not demand. Why most decentralized compute networks would die in a month without emissions — and what a real one looks like.
Pricing Watch
Real GPU market rates, trackedWe pulled on-demand rates from five hyperscalers and three decentralized marketplaces. The spread will make you angry.
The old rule was "always rent". The new rule needs a spreadsheet. Depreciation curves, utilization thresholds and the break-even points.
Landscape
Who's who, reviewed honestlyEvery project publishes "registered GPUs". Almost none publish paid hours. A unsentimental tour of who is real and who is a spreadsheet.
Nineteen startups, one metaphor, zero Airbnbs. What the marketplace metaphor hides — and which teams escaped it.
On-Chain Gaming
Games, economies — and their compute billsThe autopsies are done: paying players to play selects for players who hate games. What the survivors rebuilt on the ashes.
Out of hundreds of "AAA web3 games" promised since 2021, five are live, patched weekly and retain players. A field report.
Every studio wants ChatGPT-grade villagers. Nobody budgeted for them. The hidden line item that connects game servers to decentralized compute.
About this forum
The Decentralized Compute Forum (DCF) is an editorial publication about GPU markets, DePIN networks and the economics of AI compute. We write it, we argue in it, we publish our sources — and we change our minds in public when the data does.
No paywall, no sponsored posts. Comments run on GitHub Discussions — github.com/CBTdao.