The anatomy of a GPU-hour
Before you can rent one GPU for one hour, a fab has to etch it, a memory maker has to stack it, someone has to build it into a machine, capital has to finance it, and a building has to power and cool it. Pick a GPU — the chain and the arithmetic change with the silicon. Every number below is verified against a public source.
Dashed boxes are commodity inputs; solid boxes are companies and layers. Hover any box for context. The provider box is live — it lists who priced this SKU in the latest daily aggregate.
Today’s cross-provider median for NVIDIA H100 SXM is $3.99/hr (2026-08-11). Power basis: published full-system wall power (DGX H100: 10.2 kW ÷ 8). The verifiable operating inputs explain little of the price:
Electricity. 1.275 kW at the wall × PUE 1.54 × 8.71¢/kWh = 1.96 kWh costing $0.171/hr — 4.3% of the market price. A best-in-class fleet (PUE 1.09) pays $0.121.
Water, bounded high. At 1.8 L/kWh and a deliberately expensive $5/m³: ≈2.3 L and $0.011/hr. An environmental and siting constraint — not a line item.
The other 95% is the machine itself. $3.81/hr is capital recovery on the hardware and networking, the building, staff, and margin — hardware amortization under competition. That’s why prices fall as supply arrives, and why the H100 SXM price history is worth watching.
| Input | Value | Source | Checked |
|---|---|---|---|
| NVIDIA H100 SXM power basis DGX H100: 10.2 kW ÷ 8 — includes CPUs, memory, NICs, fans | 1.275 kW | NVIDIA specifications | 2026-08-10 |
| US industrial electricity, average retail | 0.0871 $/kWh | EIA Electric Power Monthly (May 2026, preliminary) | 2026-08-10 |
| Industry average PUE | 1.54 × | Uptime Institute Global Survey 2025 (weighted avg; ~flat six years) | 2026-08-10 |
| Best-in-class fleet PUE (Google, 2025) | 1.09 × | Google data center efficiency (2025 fleet average) | 2026-08-10 |
| Water usage effectiveness, evaporative-cooling upper range Used as an upper bound; many fleets report far lower. | 1.8 L/kWh | Operator-reported WUE ranges (~0.2 hyperscaler best → ~1.8 evaporative) | 2026-08-10 |
| Industrial water price, generous upper bound Chosen high on purpose: even at $5/m³ the water line stays under two cents. | 5 $/m³ | Upper-bound assumption (US industrial rates are typically well below this) | 2026-08-10 |
What this page is: reference context, computed from public, dated sources, with the arithmetic shown. What it is not: our measured data. Hardware and facility costs are deliberately presented as a residual rather than estimated — vendors don’t publish server street prices, and we don’t print numbers we can’t stand behind. Nothing on this page feeds the Index or any published series (see methodology).