Pulse H100 SXM Neocloud OD — Methodology v1.0
Median on-demand list price per GPU-hour for H100 SXM across neocloud providers.
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Plain-language summary
Pulse H100 SXM Neocloud OD is a daily price assessment for the NVIDIA H100 SXM 80GB GPU on the neocloud segment of the cloud GPU market, on a on-demand basis. The published value is the median of normalized on-demand prices reported by neocloud providers in the contributing list below, expressed in USD per GPU-hour.
Formal definition
For each assessment date t, let pi,t denote the normalized on-demand price (USD per GPU-hour) reported by provider i in the neocloud NVIDIA H100 SXM 80GB contributing set on date t. The published value is
Index_t = median_i ( p_i,t )
over the contributing providers that meet the data-quality criteria for date t. Equal weight is applied to all contributing providers; no volume-weighting or market-share-weighting is used.
Source family
Neocloud — GPU-focused cloud providers with simpler procurement, published list pricing, and narrower service scope. Neocloud providers do not offer the full hyperscaler service surface but typically provision GPU capacity faster and at lower headline rates.
Source families are never blended into a single number. Hyperscaler pricing for a given GPU consistently runs several multiples above neocloud pricing for the same hardware. The spread reflects real differences in the product being purchased — infrastructure reliability, compliance, networking, support, ecosystem — not market inefficiency. Pulse follows established price-reporting-agency practice in publishing separate assessments per family.
Data sources
Contributing providers and the per-provider pricing model:
| Provider | Pricing model | Region scope |
|---|---|---|
| Lambda Labs | Direct per-GPU-hour from REST API. | Not region-filtered (single global price). |
| RunPod | Direct per-GPU-hour for single-GPU; per-instance normalized to per-GPU for multi-GPU. | Not region-filtered (single global price). |
| CoreWeave | Direct per-GPU-hour from public pricing page. | Not region-filtered. |
| Paperspace | Direct per-GPU-hour for single-GPU instances; multi-GPU and committed-use pricing excluded. | Not region-filtered. |
| DataCrunch (Verda Cloud) | Per-instance normalized to per-GPU-hour; smallest available instance preferred. | Not region-filtered. |
All providers are collected daily. The assessment anchor time is 18:00 UTC; data collected within the assessment window (typically 17:00–19:00 UTC) is attributed to the 18:00 UTC assessed_at timestamp for that date. Collection runs 365 days per year.
Filter rules
- Pricing type. Only on-demand prices contribute to this series. Reserved, committed-use, calendar-mode, and defined-duration pricing variants are excluded, as is spot pricing (tracked separately under its own series).
- GPU canonicalization. Each provider uses different identifiers for the same physical GPU. Pulse maintains a canonical GPU model registry that maps every provider-specific name to a single canonical model. Only prices that resolve to the canonical NVIDIA H100 SXM 80GB model contribute to this series.
- Region. US-region pricing for hyperscalers (per the regions in the contributing-provider table). Neocloud providers that publish a single global price are included without region filtering.
- SKU canonicalization. Hyperscaler pricing APIs return many SKU variants per instance type. Each collector filters to exactly one canonical on-demand SKU per instance type (Linux operating system, shared tenancy, on-demand market option, no Capacity Block reservation, no bundled software).
- Anomaly review. A provider price that deviates by more than 50% from the current series median is flagged for review. Flagged prices are included unless determined to be a data-quality issue (API error, stale data, misclassified SKU). Any exclusion is logged in the public corrections page.
Aggregation method
Headline statistic
Median (P50). The median is robust to outliers and avoids giving disproportionate weight to a single provider's pricing decision. It is also easier to defend as a neutral reference point than a trimmed mean or a single percentile.
Supporting statistics
Alongside the headline median, Pulse calculates and stores P25, P75, min, max, and the contributing provider count for each assessment. Individual provider assessments are stored with full provenance (raw collection ID, collector version, methodology version, normalization note).
Weighting
Equal weight across all contributing providers. No volume-weighting, market-share-weighting, or tiering is applied.
Worked example
On a date where all five neoclouds publish a price, the five prices are sorted and the median taken. With an odd count, the median is the middle value; with an even count after one provider drops out (still ≥3 contributing), it is the average of the two middle values.
Publishability thresholds
Publishable: 3 or more neocloud providers report a valid price. Caveated (“thin data”): 2 providers report. Unpublishable: fewer than 2.
Publishability is evaluated each assessment date. The series may publish on most days but be marked unpublishable on any date where contributing-provider count falls below the threshold; on such dates, no headline value is published, the underlying provider-level data remains stored, and the series resumes publication on the next date that meets the threshold.
Edge cases and known limitations
- No bundling adjustment. Neocloud providers price per GPU-hour directly. There is no instance-level bundle to divide out, and no bundling adjustment is applied.
- Single-GPU representative. Where a neocloud offers multiple instance sizes for the same GPU, the smallest standard instance is the representative configuration. The smallest instance most closely reflects per-GPU economics.
- Committed and multi-GPU pricing excluded. Discounted rates for multi-GPU configurations or committed-use pricing offered by some neoclouds are excluded from this on-demand series, to maintain comparability with single-GPU on-demand rates across the family.
- Carry-forward window. If a provider's API is unreachable on a given date, that provider's most recent valid assessment from the preceding 3 calendar days is used in the index calculation. The underlying data remains a truthful record of what was collected on each date — no synthetic rows are inserted into the assessment table — and carried-forward contributions are flagged in the published output via the
is_carried_forwardfield.
Source code
The implementing code lives in the public repository: https://github.com/pulsebenchmarks. Each tagged release of the repository corresponds to a methodology version; the v1.0 release implements this page.
Changelog
v1.0 — Initial published methodology. Defines source-family segmentation, headline median statistic, equal-weight aggregation, provider list, publishability thresholds, and the carry-forward policy described above.