Time and coverage

The benchmarks are monthly series of list prices, and a list price behaves unlike a market price: it holds for months, then steps. This page states how time is handled, what a held month means, what happens when a provider is missing, and when a change over a period is quoted and when it is refused.

Monthly resolution#

The resolution is monthly, because that is the finest the sources support. Nothing in the benchmarks is daily or intraday, and no observation is invented to fill a gap. Silicon Data's indices on the market-data page are daily, and are a different kind of number; see Silicon Data indices.

Held prices#

A step line holds the last published price until the next publication, which is how a list price behaves. A flat chart for months at a time is the normal case, not a loading failure. A tooltip marks a held month so a held price is never mistaken for a fresh one, and the regional table under each GPU marks a held region with the month its price was last published.

How far back each provider goes#

Amazon Web Services

AWS publishes a dated version of the full price list roughly once a month, archived back to December 2015. Every GPUQuant point is one of those official versions.

Microsoft Azure

Azure publishes current prices only, with no historical archive of any kind. The Azure series begins when GPUQuant took its first snapshot and cannot be backfilled.

Google Cloud

Google Cloud answers historical queries one calendar month at a time, back to January 2017. Every GPUQuant point is the price Google reported as effective in that month.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

Oracle publishes a current price list with a single lastUpdated date and no archive of any kind, so the Oracle series can only accumulate forward from the first GPUQuant reading.

Each record keeps its own type, and the three are never blurred: an official publication from an archived AWS price list, an effective interval Google reported for that month, or a GPUQuant snapshot of Azure's or Oracle's current-only feed.

Series therefore start at different dates and have different lengths. A B200 series is short because B200 reached the clouds recently. An Azure series is short because Azure publishes no archive. Neither is an error, and charts show them at their real length rather than stretching them.

Missing providers#

A provider with no eligible offering is absent, not zero. It renders as “not currently offered” with the reason, never as $0.00, an empty line or a gap that implies a price fell.

The clearest current example is B200 on Azure. Azure publishes GB200 NVL, a rack-scale Grace-Blackwell system in which Blackwell GPUs are coupled to Grace CPUs over NVLink. That is a different machine from an eight-GPU HGX B200 node, so Azure contributes no B200 quote rather than a misleading one.

Coverage changes#

When the contributing provider set changes between two months, the reference price can move for a reason that has nothing to do with prices. Every stored point records its provider set, a month where the set changed is annotated on the chart, and such a month is excluded from “last official price change”, because a coverage step is not a price move.

Period changes#

A period change is only published when both endpoints are measuring the same thing. GPUQuant rebuilds both endpoints from the providers present in both months and states that basis next to the number.

If no provider spans both endpoints, or the series does not reach back far enough, the answer is N/A with an explanation rather than a number that would quietly measure a coverage change. This is why a twelve-month change can read N/A on a GPU whose price is plainly visible on the chart: the chart shows the headline reference, and the change is refusing to compare a two-provider month against a three-provider month.

Daily ingestion, monthly figure#

Ingestion runs daily, so a list-price change is seen within a day. A month's stored figure is the last reading taken in that month, and every daily reading is kept as evidence beneath it, keyed on the source's own version, so an intra-month change replaces the earlier monthly figure without losing the earlier reading.

A change log over those raw readings dates each move by the provider's effective date where it states one, and marks it “seen” where the date is GPUQuant's first read. It is shown under each provider chart on the market-data page as recent price changes. Two readings are only ever compared in the same currency and the same pricing type, so a provider publishing a spot rate beside its on-demand one does not produce a pair of opposite changes every day.