Build vs. Rent Calculator

Compare the total cost of owning GPU infrastructure versus renting cloud instances. Adjust utilization to find your break-even point.

Hardware

GPU Model

GPU Count: 64

On-prem system cost ($)

Annual operating cost ($)

Cloud provider

Hourly rate per GPU ($)

GPU Utilization: 70%

10%100%

Time horizon: 3 years

On-prem 3yr TCO

$5.3M

Cloud 3yr cost

$4.6M

Premium (on-prem)

$653.0K

Break-even month

Never

Break-even utilization: 80%. Your utilization is below break-even — cloud is more cost-effective.

Utilization	On-prem 3yr	Cloud 3yr	Savings	Break-even
30%	$5.3M	$2.0M	$-3.3M	Never
40%	$5.3M	$2.6M	$-2.6M	Never
50%	$5.3M	$3.3M	$-2.0M	Never
60%	$5.3M	$4.0M	$-1.3M	Never
70%	$5.3M	$4.6M	$-653.0K	Never
80%	$5.3M	$5.3M	+$8.0K	Month 36
90%	$5.3M	$5.9M	+$669.0K	Month 29
100%	$5.3M	$6.6M	+$1.3M	Month 24

At what utilization does owning GPUs beat cloud?: Industry consensus places the break-even at approximately 50–60% GPU utilization. Below 50%, cloud is cheaper due to flexibility and no upfront capex. Above 60%, owning wins — but the downside risk of low utilization is much larger than the upside of high utilization.
What is typical GPU utilization for training workloads?: Training workloads typically achieve 60–70% utilization. Optimized environments with containerization and MIG partitioning can reach 70–80%+. Under-optimized enterprise deployments often see only 20–30%. Frontier model training achieves 35–40% Model FLOPS Utilization (MFU).
How long until on-prem GPUs pay for themselves?: At high utilization (70%+), hardware payback occurs at approximately 12 months for H100 vs AWS P5. At 50% utilization, break-even extends to 30+ months. Below 40% utilization, on-prem may never break even within the GPU refresh cycle.