July 2026
What take-or-pay actually costs you
Reserved GPU contracts are often sold as “cheaper than on-demand.” That is incomplete. The right question is where your utilisation breaks even against the take-or-pay floor, and which contract levers move that number.
Reserved vs on-demand is a utilisation problem
On-demand (or short-cycle spot-adjacent) pricing looks expensive per GPU-hour because you are buying flexibility. Reserved capacity looks cheaper per GPU-hour because you are selling the provider utilisation certainty. If your sustained utilisation sits below the break-even point implied by the reservation, the “discount” is an accounting illusion.
Break-even is not a single industry constant. It moves with hardware class, interconnect requirements, term length, ramp schedules and whether idle hours can be substituted or released. Treat any vendor’s generic “X% cheaper” claim as marketing until you model it against your own utilisation curve.
Where break-even usually sits
For multi-month reserved blocks on current-generation training clusters, the commercial logic typically holds when sustained utilisation is durable enough that unused reserved hours would otherwise dominate the bill. [DATA: insert Accruex view of indicative break-even utilisation bands by class once confirmed.] Below that band, shorter structures or hybrid reserved-plus-burst often price cleaner than a long take-or-pay.
Levers that matter more than the headline rate
- Term length. Longer terms buy rate; they also raise the cost of being wrong about demand.
- Ramp schedules. Staged delivery reduces early unused hours when clusters come online ahead of model readiness.
- Substitution rights on hardware refresh. The right to migrate to next-gen within a framework prevents stranded last-gen reservations.
- Minimums and measurement. How utilisation is measured (calendar vs available hours; maintenance windows) changes the economic floor.
What to ask before you sign
Ask for the all-in reserved rate, the on-demand comparator for the same topology, the measurement definition for take-or-pay, exit and reduction mechanics, and substitution on refresh. If those are not in the proposal, you do not yet have a contract; you have a brochure.