price of compute

NVIDIA RTX 4090 rental price

Median $0.74/GPU-hr on-demand · across 2 providers · Updated 2026-08-11 04:38 UTC · Anatomy ↓

Price history

$0.00$0.20$0.40$0.60$0.80Aug 9Aug 10Aug 11$0.28$0.74$0.31

Each point is the daily cross-provider median for this SKU and pricing type (per-provider medians first, so no marketplace’s volume dominates). Gaps are gaps — we don’t interpolate missing data.

The spread: the same NVIDIA RTX 4090 ranges from $0.67 to $0.74 per hour across tracked providers right now — a 1.1× difference. This is why we exist.

Where to rent it

ProviderTypeRegion$/GPU-hrSeen
Vast.aiVast.aiSpotNO$0.202026-08-10 18:02 UTC
SaladCloudSaladCloudCommunity$0.222026-08-11 04:38 UTC
RunPodRunPodCommunity$0.342026-08-11 04:38 UTC
Vast.aiVast.aiOn-demandGB$0.672026-08-10 21:00 UTC
RunPodRunPodOn-demand$0.742026-08-11 04:38 UTC

Prices are as listed by providers at scrape time; availability at a listed price isn’t guaranteed. Links marked ↗ may be affiliate links — they never affect prices shown or ordering.

Anatomy: why it costs this

Everything that has to exist before one RTX 4090-hour can be rented — then the arithmetic on the parts that can be priced honestly.

The foundry. Nearly every datacenter GPU is fabbed here — the tightest bottleneck in the chain.TSMC4N (AD102) process · packagingThe memory feeding this SKU — for HBM parts, the second great bottleneck.Micron (GDDR6X is Micron-…GDDR6X · 24 GBDesign and the software moat — and most of the margin in the whole chain.NVIDIAGPU design & softwareHow this silicon becomes a rentable machine.ASUS · MSI · Gigabyteboard partners (consumer card…Fleets are financed; capital recovery is the largest slice of the hourly price.Capital marketsdebt & equityColo and hyperscale facilities; PUE lives here.Data centersland · shell · coolingGrid electricity including cooling overhead (PUE) — priced on the cost stack below.Power gridkWh per GPU-hourEvaporative-cooling upper bound — environmentally real, economically small.Waterliters per GPU-hourThe providers listing this SKU right now — the layer this site prices hourly.Clouds & marketplacesVast.ai · RunPodThe number this site tracks.You$0.74/GPU-hr median
Electricity$0.06/hr8.2%0.69 kWh from the grid
Water (upper bound)$0.004/hr0.5%≤ 0.8 L, priced high on purpose
Capital · facility · network · staff · margin$0.68/hr91.3%everything the operating inputs don't explain

Power basis: vendor GPU TDP only — full-server draw runs meaningfully higher × PUE 1.54 × 8.71¢/kWh (0.69 kWh from the grid). Water bounded at 1.8 L/kWh and $5/m³ — deliberately high. The residual is hardware amortization, facility, staff, and margin — presented as a residual because vendors don’t publish server street prices, and we don’t print numbers we can’t stand behind.

Verified inputs & sources
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Last scrape: 2026-08-11 04:38 UTC · 1494 observations today across 16 providers · Failures logged, never interpolated.

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