The compute arbitrage, explained honestly

A twelve-month B200 contract costs about $4.86 an hour. The same card rents by the hour for about $6.69. That gap looks like free money: buy the year, sell the hours. It is not, and it is worth understanding why, because the reason is the whole design of this market.

Why buying long and selling short loses

Fill. A marketplace only pays you for the hours somebody actually rents. The price you can sell at is the lowest ask on the board, not the average, and after the venue's cut of about fifteen per cent you need to rent more than ninety per cent of every hour just to break even.

Price. The H100 rented for about $8 an hour in early 2024 and about $2 by 2026. AWS cut its price by forty-four per cent in a single day in June 2025. A B200 moved from $2.31 to over $6 within twelve months. A year-long commitment is a bet on that line, and there is no instrument to lay it off.

Paper. The contract you bought says you may not sublicense it.

What works

Match the tenor. Do not hold months you have not sold. The buyer signs first, the seller is paid second, and the desk holds the position for days, not quarters. Sell whole windows to a team that needs a block for a quarter, at a price that sits under the hourly rate and above the contract.

The premium the desk earns is payment for two things: somebody carried the months, and somebody delivered the block. It is not a free lunch. Whoever holds unsold months carries the price. The desk holds none.