1-year card
$3.76
One-year payback on the ~$33k card alone, rented every hour. Before power.
H100 HOURLY PRICE · NOT A UTILIZATION STORY
GPU rental
is the life canary.
A rented Nvidia GPU earns a six-year life, or it does not, in the hourly rental price. Utilization quotes — Google's old TPUs at 100% is the example — are not the signal. H100 first. H200 and B200 are context on the same tape, not this canary. No level on this page is a tripwire. Jon has not set one.
$2.79OCPI-H100 · Oct 2, 2026
~16 mocard only · 16.2 mo · before power
$2.39net after ~$0.40 · rough opex
~19 moabout 19 months
01 · THE PRINT
Settled trades, not a rate card.
Primary source is Ornn's OCPI-H100 transaction index. Scraped listings are a glance, later.
Ornn's OCPI-H100, the settled transaction index for NVIDIA H100 SXM (Hopper, 80 GB), was $2.79 per GPU-hour on Oct 2, 2026, settled daily at 4:00 PM ET. That is the canary. The same page printed −4.5% on the day, −2.1% over seven days, and −1.4% over thirty days (from $2.83). The public three-month window ran $2.46 to $3.17. Ornn states the same print as $66.96 per GPU-day and about $2,008.80 per GPU-month. Read live Oct 3, 2026.
Implied life on the $33,000 card, rented every hour, from this same $2.79 print — not a second month figure that can drift. Card only: 33,000 / (2.79 × 8,760) × 12 = 16.2 months, about 16 months, before power. After subtracting about $0.40/hr for power and colocation — a rough operating cost, not a quote — net rent is $2.39, which is 18.9 months, about 19 months.
Same page, same settle, not the canary: H200 $6.23 and B200 $7.90 per GPU-hour. They say where newer cards are printing. They do not answer whether an H100 still earns a long life.
Sep 19$2.85
Sep 20$2.65
Sep 21$2.79
Sep 22$2.85
Sep 23$3.05
Sep 24$2.92
Sep 25$2.85
Sep 26$2.54
Sep 27$2.49
Sep 28$2.56
Sep 29$2.74
Sep 30$2.71
Oct 1$2.92
Oct 2$2.79
WINDOW These fourteen days are the public table on the Ornn page. Full history is behind a paid tier and is not reconstructed here.
02 · REFERENCE LINES
Payback math, not a dial.
Horizontal lines on the H100 chart. None of them is marked as a crack. None of them flips a score.
Gold line: Ornn OCPI-H100, the 14 settled days printed on the public page (through Oct 2, 2026). Dashed lines are rounded reference math on a ~$33k card — not a dial, not a crack, not a tripwire. Jon has not set a level that flips this page.
3-year + power
$1.70
Short-life line. Three-year straight-line on the card plus ~$0.40/hr.
6-year + power
$1.00
Six-year straight-line on the card plus the same ~$0.40/hr.
Anchor: an H100 SXM at about $33,000, before the rest of the server. GPU Economy's median new-condition store price, re-read Oct 3, 2026, was $32,960 across 5 listings from 4 sellers (most recent listing September 28, 2026; page stamp 13:40 UTC). The lines use the round $33,000, not the raw median. $32,960 / 8,760 is about $3.76 — which is why the one-year label lands on $3.76.
The lines assume the card is rented every hour. They are rounded, and the clean division does not hit those cents:
- 1-year 33,000 / 8,760 ≈ $3.77. Labeled $3.76. Jon attributes a one-year payback to Elon. Today's $2.79 index is about 16 months on the card, before power (16.2 months), from the same formula as the print above.
- 3-year 33,000 / (3 × 8,760) ≈ $1.26, plus $0.40 ≈ $1.66. Labeled $1.70. This is the short-life line.
- 6-year 33,000 / (6 × 8,760) ≈ $0.63, plus $0.40 ≈ $1.03. Labeled $1.00. Below this, a full rack still does not earn the life on the books.
The $0.40 is a rough operating cost for power and colocation, not a quote from a utility or a colo contract. A full server at $31,000–$40,000 per GPU — a working range, not a listing re-read on this page — moves where the one-year line sits. From those bounds, still every hour and still before power: 31,000 / 8,760 ≈ $3.54, and 40,000 / 8,760 ≈ $4.57. The high end is above the card-only line. The low end is not, because $31k is under the $33k card anchor. No single server-adjusted dollar is printed beyond that arithmetic.
Where today's $2.79 print sits against those three lines. Above or below is a comparison. It is not a dial, a score, or a tripwire.
- $3.76 · below The print is under the one-year line, so the card takes longer than a year. Implied life before power is about 16 months.
- $1.70 · above The print is over the short-life line: the hourly rent is more than a 3-year life plus roughly $0.40.
- $1.00 · above The print is over the six-year line: the hourly rent still covers a 6-year straight-line life plus the same roughly $0.40. Below $1.00, a full rack still does not earn the life on the books.
03 · SPOT VS TERM
Two different stories.
A falling spot print does not, by itself, say the contract book fell with it.
A falling spot price with firm 1-year and 3-year prices is a different story from both falling. Spot (or a short transaction index) can cheapen because leftover hours are being cleared, while a buyer who wants the card for a year or three still pays up. The reverse matters too: if the long contracts fall with the spot print, the life on the books is what moved, not just this week's leftover capacity. This page does not pick which story today is. It does not have a live 3-year transaction print.
SemiAnalysis H100 spot-contract index (Bloomberg ticker SAH100SC), public dashboard fetched Oct 3, 2026. The page's history table runs through Apr 2026, not October. Last composite it actually prints is Mar 2026 at $2.80 per GPU-hour (Feb $2.83, Jan $2.82). Apr 2026 composite is a dash; on-demand is marked sold out; the 1-year range is $2.10–$2.70. A separate "current market" row also places $2.82 beside H100 / Apr 2026, but empty cells in that row make the column uncertain, so $2.82 is not treated here as a confirmed April composite. Cells for 3-year and longer were blank. One-year ranges on that history moved from about $1.45–$1.95 in Oct 2025 to $2.10–$2.70 in Apr 2026 while the composite sat near $2.80 — term firming in that vintage, not a live Oct 2026 contract. H200's composite cell on the current table was blank.
Bargo, glance only, page dated Oct 3, 2026: H100 averages across listings of on-demand $3.38, spot $2.00, reserved $3.03 (57 providers). Not the spine of this page. Same glance, context only: H200 on-demand $4.67 / spot $2.62 / reserved $3.93; B200 on-demand $6.79 / spot $4.52 / reserved $5.81.
GPU Economy on-demand median, glance only: $3.37 per H100 GPU-hour, week of September 28, 2026, provisional, 30 listed rates from 28 providers, read Oct 3, 2026at 13:40 UTC. That is a median of public rate cards, not a settled trade, and it is not the canary. The retail median used for the card anchor is from the same site's H100 SXM page, cited above.
04 · CROSS-READS
Same stack, other pages.
The rental price sits next to the financed buyer, not inside the Horsemen Index.
05 · SOURCES
In this order.
If a number is not here, it was not on the page. No guessed contract.
- PRIMARY · Ornn OCPI-H100 — $2.79 / GPU-hour, settled Oct 2, 2026. H200 $6.23, B200 $7.90, same page, context only. data.ornn.com/markets/h100-sxm ↗
- SemiAnalysis H100 spot-contract index — SAH100SC. Public history through Apr 2026 as fetched Oct 3, 2026. Mar 2026 composite $2.80; Apr 2026 1-year range $2.10–$2.70; Apr composite unpublished on the history table; 3-year cells blank. gpu-index.semianalysis.com ↗
- Bargo — glance, updated Oct 3, 2026. H100 on-demand $3.38, spot $2.00, reserved $3.03. bargo.ai/gpu-prices ↗
- GPU Economy — on-demand median $3.37, week of Sep 28, 2026 (provisional), read Oct 3, 2026 13:40 UTC. Retail median $32,960 (new store, 4 sellers). price index ↗ · H100 SXM ↗
Not on the Horsemen Index, the thesis dials, or the ledger. Reference lines are rounded payback arithmetic. Nothing on this page is a tripwire, a dial, or a claim that a price level cracks the trade. Structures and prints move; re-read the source.