An H100 or B200 hour costs its listed rate only while it does useful work; per finished job you also pay for startup, idle time and any work redone after a failure. In our worked 8 x H100 example those extras add 2.5% to 12.5% before anything breaks, and Nodus was lowest per finished job for both GPUs among the five options we priced. A B200 is only cheaper than an H100 if it finishes the job faster than its price ratio, which ranged from 1.58x to 2.22x.

Why is the cheapest hourly rate not the cheapest job?

The hourly rate is one input. The bill is the rate multiplied by hours you did not plan to pay for.

We use one formula for every option.

cost per finished job = rate x GPUs x (training hours + startup + idle tail + redone hours) + storage + egress

The idle tail depends on how a platform bills. Instance-style platforms charge until you shut the machine down. Lambda bills instances in one-minute increments.…