Is It Better to Rent or Buy a GPU?

Buy(t) = all-in acquisition + accrued financing interest + recurring ownership costs + the net cash-flow timing adjustment − net resale value at exit month t.

Rent(t) = the sum of each month’s useful-work bill at that month’s modeled rental rate + fixed cloud costs + any net cash-flow timing adjustment.

The expected investment return values when cash leaves your hands. Purchase cash is normally unavailable from day one, while rental payments leave gradually. Because both choices consume cash, the calculator nets out investment growth common to both and displays only the incremental penalty caused by the earlier or larger stream of payments. This preserves the same comparison as compounding every payment to the horizon without presenting rent with a misleading standalone “opportunity cost.” Financed purchases use their actual monthly payments, with any remaining balance treated as an exit-date payoff.

Rental prices and resale values each follow an annual change rate, negative for falling and positive for rising, decaying toward a user-set floor. They are separate settings because cloud rates and used-card prices do not move in lockstep: H100 rental collapsed while used H100 cards held their value. Every chart point assumes a hypothetical sale at that date, so break-even includes the card still in your hands.

GPU identity, memory, power and installation facts come from manufacturer documentation. Purchase prices are a small, manually reviewed U.S. snapshot of retailer, reseller, marketplace and quote context. Accessories, empty boxes, broken cards and wrong generations were rejected. “6000” alone is not a model match.

Rental observations preserve community marketplaces, managed GPU clouds, specialty managed service and hyperscalers as separate operating models. The calculator uses only the selected trust band, moving upward only when that band has no credible published offer. The default is the median eligible ordinary on-demand observation in the band actually used. Spot, interruptible, reservations and commitments remain excluded from the source default; a visible commitment-discount input can model a real quote.

Published rental observations are normalized to a per-GPU-hour rate and scale linearly with the requested quantity. Provider packaging or instance minimums may appear in source notes, but the calculator does not invent or impose them.

ZIP lookup uses the U.S. Electric Utility Companies and Rates dataset compiled by NREL for the Department of Energy (2024), licensed CC BY 4.0. It is an average residential rate for likely utilities, not your tariff. Manual marginal cost is more accurate.

The annual room-side electricity factor blends heating, cooling and neutral seasons. Nearly all computer electricity becomes room heat. Heating receives a credit based on the selected heating system; cooling assumes a typical SEER-14 air conditioner and adds roughly 24% during cooling hours. The model never applies a winter credit and summer penalty to the same hour.

The 13% selling-cost default approximates a fee-bearing marketplace sale. eBay states that final-value fees depend on category and apply to the total transaction; its general non-store schedule is currently 13.6% up to $7,500. Set this to zero for a fee-free local sale. Official eBay fee schedule.

Low/high shading uses the reviewed purchase asking-price range, the 10th- and 90th-percentile eligible rental observations inside the trust band actually used, and annual resale-value change five points above or below your assumption. It is a deterministic sensitivity range—not a probability forecast, confidence interval or statistical error bar.

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