The cost of renting Nvidia’s H100 GPUs is coming back down after a spike earlier this month, according to data from the Ornn Compute Price Index. For anyone running AI workloads on rented hardware, the timing matters: the GPU rental market is no longer just an infrastructure concern. It’s becoming a full-blown financial market.
Ornn AI Inc., which publishes the OCPI, a benchmark derived from actual trades rather than listed prices, has been tracking the pullback in real time. The index is now accessible on the Bloomberg Terminal, putting GPU rental pricing alongside oil futures and Treasury yields in the toolkit of institutional traders.
The numbers behind the slide
H100 rental rates have been on a wild ride. To put the trajectory in context, hourly rates hit around $8 back in early 2024, when demand for Nvidia’s chips far outstripped supply. By March 2026, one-year contract pricing had settled closer to $2.35 per hour. Recent prediction market activity pegged rates near $1.80 per hour.
Then came the early May surge, pushing prices back up before the current decline set in. The OCPI captures these moves because it tracks live-traded prices, not broker quotes or self-reported figures.
