Equation 8 · Comparing the Main Approaches to AI Inference Economics
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Symbol P_d
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Here the break-even arithmetic is genuinely simple, and worth writing down, because it is the one place in this comparison where a clean model — not a ranking of vendors — is possible. Let a reserved commitment cost per accelerator-hour, and let the on-demand or serverless rate that would otherwise serve the same throughput cost per accelerator-hour at full utilization. If the buyer’s realized utilization of the reserved capacity is u (0, 1] , the reserved option is cheaper exactly when
Sources cited in the article section
- [1] EC2 On-Demand Instance Pricing ↗
- [4] Compute Savings Plans Pricing ↗
- [7] Provisioned Throughput for Foundry Models ↗
- [8] Pricing ↗
- [6] GPU Cloud Pricing ↗
These citations give research context. Read each source to check which claims it supports.
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