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.
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