---
title: "Should I buy hardware or rent cloud GPUs for AI inference?"
description: "Rent for short or spiky work; buy for steady, long-running work. An H100 rents for about $3.29 to $4.29 an hour, or $2,400 to $3,100 a month if it runs nonstop. A large open model such as DeepSeek V3.1 at 4-bit needs five to eight H100s, or $12,000 to $25,000 a month rented, while three 256 GB Mac Studios that run it cost $28,497 once."
url: https://exolabs.net/faq/buy-or-rent-gpus-for-ai/
updated: 2026-10-26
---

# Should I buy hardware or rent cloud GPUs for AI inference?

Rent for short or spiky work; buy for steady, long-running work. An H100 rents for about $3.29 to $4.29 an hour, or $2,400 to $3,100 a month if it runs nonstop. A large open model such as DeepSeek V3.1 at 4-bit needs five to eight H100s, or $12,000 to $25,000 a month rented, while three 256 GB Mac Studios that run it cost $28,497 once.

Rented datacenter GPUs deliver far more throughput when many requests run at once. For a busy public service, that throughput can justify the price.

For a team, memory capacity is usually the limit, not raw throughput. Owned Macs give the most memory per dollar and per watt.

Owning also removes egress fees, availability limits and the risk of a provider changing prices.

**Where exo fits:** exo runs on the hardware you buy, with no per-token or per-hour charges. Exo Labs can compare an owned Mac cluster against your current cloud spend.

Sources:
- [Lambda: on-demand GPU cloud pricing](https://lambda.ai/pricing)
- [Apple Store: Mac Studio prices (checked Oct 26, 2026)](https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/mac-studio)
- [Hugging Face: deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V3.1](https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V3.1)

Page: https://exolabs.net/faq/buy-or-rent-gpus-for-ai/ · Updated 2026-10-26 · Deployments: https://exolabs.net/#business (sales@exolabs.net)