marketplace · container · Layer 2.5
Akash Network
Teams with an explicit decentralisation requirement.
medium portability Movable with effort. Expect to redo images, storage wiring and networking.
What you are buying
- Business model
- Brokers capacity somebody else owns. Cheapest headline rates, and the machine you get is not the machine you chose.
- How you reach it
- You push a container image and it runs. No cluster to operate.
- Accelerators
- Aggregated, mostly consumer and older datacentre parts
- Regions
- Distributed
- Pricing model
- Reverse auction, crypto-settled.
- Getting started
- Low, but requires wallet mechanics.
- Capacity
- Small relative to the commercial market.
- Ownership
- Decentralised protocol.
Verified 2026-09-09. Fields reading “not published” are exactly that — we do not estimate a figure a vendor withholds.
The counterparty
No company to sue and no SLA to invoke. That is the design, not a defect.
A multi-year GPU commitment is a credit decision wearing a cloud contract. This is the section no benchmark covers and the one that decides what happens to your workload in 2028.
The catch
The operational overhead is real and the GPU supply is thin. Choose it for the principle, and know that you are.
The economics
Auction pricing can undercut everything. Availability of anything modern is the binding constraint.
No rate is quoted on this page on purpose. Published list prices at this layer move weekly and essentially nobody signing a real contract pays them. Dated, sourced figures live in the GPU rental price index, where the spread between the cheapest and dearest seller of the identical chip runs to roughly 9x.
The layers underneath this one
Whatever you rent here is a chip in a building that needs power. In 2026 megawatts, not silicon, are the binding constraint on the whole industry — a frontier rack draws 120–200 kW against a 2026 average near 27 kW, and the US interconnection queue exceeds 2,600 GW.
Layer 2 — Silicon · Layer 1 — Energy · The interconnection queue · Tokens per watt
Compared against
- Akash Network vs io.net — Two decentralised models, and what token incentives do to your supply.Compare with io.net