Market benchmarks / compute economics / market structure
The price of compute, tracked.
GPU rental markets, market-implied forward curves, chip economics, token prices, and the gigawatt buildout — one independent desk for the machines that make intelligence.
01Forward curves
What the market thinks compute will cost
The first market-implied term structure for GPU rental: spot today, monthly tenors through Jul ’27, and the shape of supply pressure ahead.
● Market-implied term structure
Implied forward curve
First point is implied spot; remaining points are monthly-average contracts — shown in $/GPU·hr or % vs spot
Kalshi monthly-average event ladders, settled to the Ornn hourly index. Implied level is the strike where bid/ask-mid probability crosses 50%; hollow points are thin-ladder estimates.
How to read this curve
The shape is the story. B200 and H200 trade backwardated; A100 sits in contango; H100 and RTX 5090 are flat, priced to hold through Jul ’27.
Replay the archived market-implied term structure.
Computed signals
The market in four numbers
Derived from the current datasets on every build — never hand-entered.
- B200 specialist median
- $6.69/GPU·hr
- +16% y/yBlackwell demand outran supply
- NVIDIA data-center revenue · FY27 Q1
- $75.2B
- +92% y/yNext-quarter guide $91B total
- Tracked AI capex · 2026E
- $780B
- +66% vs ’25MSFT · GOOG · META · AMZN · ORCL
- GPT-4-class token floor
- $0.18/1M
- −99.5% since Mar ’23DeepSeek V4 Flash · blended 3:1
Today’s read · market snapshot JUL 17 2026 · 22:59 UTC
Compute is becoming a commodity — the fourth factor of production — and for the first time it trades like one.
B200 repriced +45% since Jul 2. Its curve is backwardated: buyers pay a premium for delivery now, and the market prices the squeeze to ease. A100 is the anchor of the board: ~$1.05 through Jul ’27 on a contango curve.
Spot is $7.21; the Jul ’27 tenor settles near $5.65.
The marketplace floor moved −3.3% over the latest three-quarter window to $1.74/GPU·hr.
The GPT-4-class blended floor is now about 210× cheaper than launch at $0.18 per million tokens.
02GPU cloud
Renting an H100, 2023 → today
US$ per GPU-hour, on-demand. From $12 at peak scarcity to a stable ~$4 — and a marketplace floor near $1.74.
H100 SXM · on-demand price
Quarterly midpoints by provider class
Provider list prices, launch announcements, and archived snapshots; quarterly midpoints ±15%. Current quotes verified 2026-07-06.
03The macro picture
Compute demand is compounding
The frontier training-compute trend runs at 4.4× a year; tracked 2026E capex is +66% versus 2025.
Training compute of notable models
Total FLOP, log scale — estimates marked
Epoch AI estimates and lab disclosures; estimated points carry wide error bars.
Big-tech capital expenditure
US$B per calendar year (2026 = guidance)
Company earnings releases and SEC filings; Microsoft includes finance leases; Oracle fiscal year mapped.
04Inference
Intelligence, repriced monthly
GPT-4-level capability became roughly 210× cheaper since launch. Then 2026 flagships reintroduced a frontier premium.
Cheapest GPT-4-class · blended
$0.18/1M
−99.5% since Mar ’23 · DeepSeek V4 Flash
OpenAI flagship · GPT-5.5
$11.25/1M
+227% vs GPT-5 · Flagship list price rose in Apr 2026
Batch & cached reality
−50 / −90%
Batch APIs ~50% off list; cached input ~90% off — production pays below list
05Quick answers
The methodology, without the footnotes
The three definitions readers need before comparing the curves, provider classes, or token-price series.
How are the GPU forward curves derived?
From Kalshi event-contract ladders on GPU rental prices, settled to Ornn's hourly index. The implied level for each tenor is the strike where the ladder's yes-probability crosses 50% — the market's median expectation, not an executable quote. Thin back months are estimates.
What does the blended token price mean?
Blended price = (3 × input + output) ÷ 4 per million tokens, reflecting a typical 3:1 read/write mix at standard list rates.
What are the provider classes?
Hyperscaler is undiscounted big-cloud list price; specialist is the AI-native cloud median; marketplace is the open-market floor on community hardware.
06Go deeper
Explore the full desk
01
GPU Cloud
On-demand rates for 16 chips across 19+ providers, with history.
H100 from $1.74/hr
02
Hardware
Specs and economics for every accelerator that matters, V100 → Rubin.
Dense BF16 $/PFLOP·hr
03
Inference
Token prices across OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI, and DeepSeek.
Floor $0.18/1M
04
Buildout
Capex, NVIDIA’s run-rate, and every gigawatt-class cluster.
~32 GW frontier pipeline