aggregator · vm · Layer 2.5
Prime Intellect
Researchers hunting the cheapest available cluster without opening ten accounts.
medium portability Movable with effort. Expect to redo images, storage wiring and networking.
What you are buying
- Business model
- Sells access across other people's clouds through one contract and one API.
- How you reach it
- You get virtual machines. The familiar cloud model.
- Accelerators
- Aggregated H100, A100 and others across providers
- Regions
- Multi-provider
- Pricing model
- Aggregated marketplace across other clouds.
- Getting started
- Self-serve.
- Capacity
- Whatever its suppliers have.
- Ownership
- Private.
Verified 2026-09-09. Fields reading “not published” are exactly that — we do not estimate a figure a vendor withholds.
The counterparty
One contract, many underlying suppliers. Convenient, and it obscures who actually holds your data.
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
An aggregator's price advantage disappears the moment you need a guarantee it cannot make on its suppliers' behalf.
The economics
Genuinely useful for price discovery even if you end up buying direct.
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
- Prime Intellect vs CUDO Compute — Two aggregators, and the question both make harder to answer: whose datacentre is this?Compare with CUDO Compute
Related providers
- AWS (P5, P6, G6) — hyperscaler, medium portability
- Crusoe — neocloud, medium portability
- CUDO Compute — marketplace, medium portability
- DataCrunch — neocloud, medium portability
- Genesis Cloud — neocloud, medium portability
- Google Cloud (A3, A4) — hyperscaler, medium portability