marketplace · bare metal · Layer 2.5
SF Compute
Training runs that can start when the price is right rather than when the calendar says.
high portability Portable. The workload is standard enough to move to another vendor without a rewrite.
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 get the physical machine. Maximum control, and every layer above it is yours to run.
- Accelerators
- H100 clusters
- Regions
- US
- Pricing model
- A genuine spot market for cluster time, with prices that clear and are published.
- Getting started
- Market participation.
- Capacity
- Cluster-scale blocks.
- Ownership
- Private.
Verified 2026-09-09. Fields reading “not published” are exactly that — we do not estimate a figure a vendor withholds.
The counterparty
Market mechanics rather than a vendor relationship.
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
You are buying a window, not a service. If your run overruns, you are back in the market at whatever it now costs.
The economics
The closest thing to a true commodity market for training compute. Its clearing price is a genuinely useful benchmark for what a reserved contract should cost.
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
- SF Compute vs Lambda — Buying a market window against buying a reservation.Compare with Lambda
Related providers
- Akash Network — marketplace, medium portability
- CUDO Compute — marketplace, medium portability
- io.net — marketplace, medium portability
- Oracle Cloud (OCI) — hyperscaler, high portability
- OVHcloud — neocloud, high portability
- RunPod — marketplace, medium portability