What the Index measures.
The Compute Price Index measures the price of AI compute as it is actually offered to a typical buyer in the public market. The Index has two methodologically distinct sections.
The direct rental section measures the on-demand hourly rate published by sixteen major GPU cloud providers across four tiers — hyperscalers, specialized neoclouds, aggregators, and cost-positioned neoclouds. These rates are observed directly on each provider's public pricing page and normalized to per-GPU-per-hour for comparability. This is the measured benchmark. It is the rate against which most other tiers — reserved contracts, committed-use agreements, enterprise deals — are priced.
The inference-implied section covers three major token-priced inference providers. These platforms charge per million tokens rather than per GPU-hour, so the Index publishes a derived per-GPU-hour equivalent using a transparent formula and a stated throughput assumption. This section is labeled separately and never conflated with the measured rates. It exists because token-priced inference is an economically significant slice of the market, and ignoring it would understate the structure of how AI compute is actually priced today.
Why nineteen providers
The panel is sized to be operationally sustainable as a manual weekly collection while still being statistically meaningful and structurally representative. Nineteen is large enough that the median is stable to single-provider movements, and small enough that every data point can be sourced, verified, and quality-checked every week. The panel is reviewed quarterly and updated as the market evolves. The full methodology document describes the procedure in complete detail.
What the Index does not include
A growing share of GPU compute is sold through enterprise contracts where pricing is confidential. Major operators including Nscale, IREN, IBM Cloud's enterprise tier, and Fluidstack are economically significant — sometimes operating at hyperscaler scale — but their pricing is not measurable through public sources. Rather than misrepresent confidential quotes as observable rates, the Index acknowledges these operators in editorial coverage but excludes them from the measured calculation. A list of acknowledged non-public providers is published below.
How the Index will be used
For buyers, the Index provides a defensible market reference point for procurement discussions — the basis against which to negotiate reserved contracts, evaluate quotes, and benchmark renewals. For builders, it tracks the input cost that sits underneath every AI business model. For investors, it measures a structural variable that moves the unit economics of every company in the AI value chain. For anyone operating in this market, it answers a question that, until now, has been surprisingly hard to answer with rigor: what did AI compute actually cost this week.