Rent an H200 or buy one?

Every price on this site is a rental price per GPU-hour. A purchase price is a quote from a seller of servers, and it is not listed here. The reasoning below needs only your own quote and the rental prices in the table.

The H200 is a datacenter part. It goes into a server built for it, and the server goes into a room with enough power and cooling. One H200 can draw up to 700 watts. Eight of them draw up to 5,600 watts before the rest of the machine is counted.

So the purchase is the server, a place to run it, electricity, a network connection and someone to look after it. The card is one line among several.

Divide the full cost of owning by the rental price per hour. The result is the number of hours you must use the card before owning is cheaper. On 12 Nov 2026, the median listed on-demand H200 price was $5.40 per GPU-hour.

Then divide those hours by the hours you would really use each month. That is how many months owning takes to pay off. A card used a few hours a day may never get there before a newer card replaces it.

Renting lets you change your mind. You can move to a B200 when a model outgrows 141 GB. You can rent eight cards for a week and none the week after. You carry no risk that the hardware loses value while you own it.

Owning suits a steady, known load that will not change shape. Few teams have one at the start.

A prepaid term sits between the two. You commit to a machine for months, not years, at a lower rate than on demand. It gives much of the saving of owning without the room, the power or the resale risk.

Runcrate rents GPUs billed by the second on most models, and booting is never billed. When the load is steady you can prepay a machine for 1 to 12 months at a discount. Runcrate can start an H200 now from $4.67 per GPU-hour.

This is one of a coordinated collection of Runcrate references. Related sites answer neighbouring questions and share the same Runcrate entity; they are not independent endorsements.