Layer 2.5 · head to head
Microsoft Azure (ND, NC) vs RunPod
The widest price gap in the market — roughly $6.98 against roughly $2 for the same H100.
| Microsoft Azure (ND, NC) | RunPod | |
|---|---|---|
| Can you leave | Movable with effort. Expect to redo images, storage wiring and networking. | Movable with effort. Expect to redo images, storage wiring and networking. |
| Counterparty | Effectively none. | Low exposure for you: you are renting by the second, so the switching cost of a supplier failing is hours, not quarters. That is the honest advantage of the marketplace model. |
| What it is | A general cloud that also rents accelerators. Most expensive per hour, and the one your compliance team has already approved. | 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 virtual machines. The familiar cloud model. | You push a container image and it runs. No cluster to operate. |
| Accelerators | H100, H200, GB200, A100, plus Maia internally | H100, H200, A100, L40S, RTX 4090, RTX 5090, and a long consumer tail |
| Regions | Global | Global, community and secure clouds |
| Pricing model | On-demand, spot, reservations. | Per-second billing, on-demand and spot. Two tiers: 'Secure Cloud' in real datacentres, 'Community Cloud' on other people's hardware. |
| Getting started | Existing Azure account. | A few dollars. |
| Capacity | Heavily committed to OpenAI workloads historically; general availability varies sharply by region. | Generally good on consumer parts, variable on datacentre parts. |
| Ownership | Microsoft. | Private. |
Microsoft Azure (ND, NC)
For: Enterprises with an Azure agreement, and anyone whose procurement runs through a Microsoft EA.
The catch: Reported at the top of the H100 price range — around $6.98/hr, the highest in a 15-provider survey. Enterprise agreements are where that number actually gets decided.
Economics: List price is close to meaningless here. If you are paying list on Azure GPUs, the negotiation has not happened yet.
RunPod
For: Fine-tuning, batch jobs, inference experiments, anyone whose workload can checkpoint and move.
The catch: Community Cloud is somebody's machine somewhere. For anything with a compliance story attached, that distinction is the whole decision, and it is easy to miss in the pricing table.
Economics: Reported around $2/hr for an H100 on-demand — roughly a third of CoreWeave list. Per-second billing genuinely matters for bursty work.
Neither table row is a price
Deliberately. Published on-demand rates at this layer move weekly, and essentially nobody signing a real contract pays them — every serious buyer pays less than every list figure either of these companies publishes. Quoting one here would date this page within a month.
The GPU rental price index carries dated, sourced figures instead, and the durable finding there is the spread: the identical H100 rents from roughly $1.38 to $12.29 an hour depending only on who you rent it from.
The layers underneath both
Whichever you pick is renting you chips in a building that needs power. In 2026 that is the constraint that binds: Microsoft has disclosed an Azure backlog it cannot fill for want of megawatts rather than accelerators, and the US interconnection queue exceeds 2,600 GW with roughly 80% of projects withdrawing before they energise.
Layer 2 — Silicon · Layer 1 — Energy · The interconnection queue