hyperscaler · bare metal · Layer 2.5
Oracle Cloud (OCI)
Large training runs that want bare-metal RDMA clusters with hyperscaler counterparty certainty.
high portability Portable. The workload is standard enough to move to another vendor without a rewrite.
What you are buying
- Business model
- A general cloud that also rents accelerators. Most expensive per hour, and the one your compliance team has already approved.
- How you reach it
- You get the physical machine. Maximum control, and every layer above it is yours to run.
- Accelerators
- H100, H200, B200, GB200, A100
- Regions
- Global
- Pricing model
- On-demand and heavily discounted committed contracts. Bare metal is a first-class product rather than an afterthought.
- Getting started
- Account, with a sales motion for clusters.
- Capacity
- Aggressively expanded; OCI has won several very large AI contracts.
- Ownership
- Oracle.
Verified 2026-09-09. Fields reading “not published” are exactly that — we do not estimate a figure a vendor withholds.
The counterparty
Effectively none.
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 cheapest hyperscaler on paper and the one whose commercial relationship people most often regret not reading carefully. Read the commit terms.
The economics
Consistently undercuts AWS and Azure on comparable GPU instances, and low egress pricing is a genuine structural difference rather than a promotion.
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 cost calculator, where the cheapest and dearest published on-demand price for the identical H100 sit 5.6× apart.
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
- AWS (P5, P6, G6) vs Oracle Cloud (OCI) — The most expensive hyperscaler against the cheapest, on egress as much as on GPUs.Compare with AWS (P5, P6, G6)
- Oracle Cloud (OCI) vs CoreWeave — Bare-metal RDMA clusters from a hyperscaler against a specialist.Compare with CoreWeave
Related providers
- AWS (P5, P6, G6) — hyperscaler, medium portability
- Google Cloud (A3, A4) — hyperscaler, medium portability
- Microsoft Azure (ND, NC) — hyperscaler, medium portability
- OVHcloud — neocloud, high portability
- SF Compute — marketplace, high portability
- Voltage Park — neocloud, high portability