ComputeAssay
New · Oct 26Commitment Book — mark your GPU contracts against live prices and delivery risk
Also new (4)
Delivery riskTen announced AI sites graded; forecasts on a hash-chained ledgerHarness v0.1Measure all-reduce bandwidth on your own metalTransfer term sheetASSAY-TT-1: making committed compute assignableReport 2026-10-26The price re-survey: what moved and why

The delivery layer for compute

The exchanges built a price for compute.
Nobody defined the product.

Cash-settled GPU futures are listing on four venues. All of them price the GPU-hour. None can deliver one — because a GPU-hour is not a fungible unit, and whether one cluster can substitute for another is a networking question the financial layer cannot answer. Compute Assay is the specification, registry, and weekly report that define the deliverable.

Substitutability is a relation between two fleets with respect to a workload class — not a property of a fleet. Eight H100s on oversubscribed Ethernet and eight in a rail-optimized non-blocking InfiniBand plane are identical goods for batch inference, different goods for large-model serving, and not comparable for frontier training. The indexes count chips. This describes deliverable capacity. — ASSAY-1 §0.1
20
providers surveyed
133
offerings graded
3.8×
same-chip price spread
Oct 5
first futures list (CME)

One chip. One week. 3.8× price spread.

$/GPU-hour, on demand · ● A/B fabric disclosed · C · D · U undisclosed Hyperstack $3.20 DataCrunch (rebranded $3.25 RunPod $3.49 Scaleway $3.61 Nebius $3.85 Crusoe $3.90 Lambda $3.99 CoreWeave $6.16 AWS $6.88 Oracle Cloud (OCI) $10.00 Google Cloud $11.06 Google Cloud $11.62 Microsoft Azure $12.29
The same H100-SXM, one week, every walk-up price we track (2026-09-10) · computeassay.com

This is not a ripoff chart — it is an undefined-product chart. The green dots publish enough about their network fabric to be underwritten; the red ones publish nothing. The spread is what an unwritten specification costs.

Excluded from the chart and spread: TensorDock's "starting at" $2.25; Voltage Park's "starting at" $1.99. Floor and teaser rates — where the bookable price is quote-gated or varies by host — are listed on the H100-SXM page with that label; they never anchor a headline number here.

ASSAY-1 — the specification
The record format, headline metrics (CSD·NBD·DCB·PFI), workload classes, substitutability grades, and verification harness that define compute as a deliverable good. Versioned like an RFC. Free forever.
The Delivered Compute Report
Weekly. What GPU capacity actually exists, what it costs, and whether it can do the job the price implies. Every row sourced.
Compute has no kilowatt-hour
The frame: why compute is pre-kWh, and the three-step path from a unit of capacity to a unit of delivered intelligence.
The Disclosure Leaderboard
Providers ranked by disclosed training-class capacity and fabric transparency — what they state in writing, not measured performance. Re-ranked weekly from public sources.
Run-cost calculator
What your training run costs this week, with a disclosed training-class band — from live tracked prices.
Open data
The full graded registry as JSON/CSV, free under CC BY 4.0. Every row sourced.

Get the Delivered Compute Report

One email a week: headline prices, deliverability grades, one teardown, and the gap between the index and what you can actually take delivery of.

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Re-surveyed 2026-10-26: 114 of 133 rows re-verified against the seller's current page (26 changed, 9 delisted); 19 could not be re-read and keep their original date. Every row carries its own as of date — staleness is disclosed, never hidden.

What an assay is

In every physical commodity market, an assay is the test that determines grade and purity — the reason a buyer in one port can trust a cargo loaded in another. Compute has never had one. Eight H100s on shared Ethernet and eight H100s in an NVLink domain with non-blocking InfiniBand sell under the same name at prices that differ by multiples, and the difference is written nowhere a contract can cite. ASSAY-1 is that test, for compute: published free, graded conservatively from what sellers state in writing, and revised in the open.