VFX & animation
Shows do not wait for a workstation. Dailies, simulation caches and final frames run on the render farm - same GPU-hour rate, either site, with a queue you can actually see.
Pick a SKU, a mode and a run length
Illustrative USD before tax. Spot is typical, not a guarantee. Reserved discounts are the published 18 / 24 / 28 / 31% schedule.
How this actually runs
Most teams do not buy a ‘solution’. They have a job: serve a model, finish a sequence, train a checkpoint, move off a hyperscaler bill. The GPUs are the same. What changes is isolation, term, queue and whether engineering is in the room.
Inference wants a reserved or bare-metal baseline behind load balancing, with on-demand overflow when QPS jumps. Training wants a host that will not disappear mid-epoch - bare metal or a reserved block, InfiniBand if you scale past one node. Render wants the farm software on L40S / 4090, or a reserved block if the delivery date is real.
Batch and ETL should be on spot if they checkpoint, on-demand if they do not. Reserved is wasted money on a job that runs twice a week. Scientific codes that already scale on CUDA use the same H100 / A100 SKUs as training; the research programme is a separate conversation about hybrid scheduling, not a SKU.
Migration is inventory first: map instance types, storage and network to our card, run one job on on-demand, then reserve or go bare metal if the numbers work. We will not promise global edge latency from two sites. If your users are far from our sites, we measure before we quote, and sometimes the honest answer is keep inference where they are.
Engineering retainers exist for the cases where the hard part is the system, not the card: pipelines, pricing engines, inference control planes, farm-to-deadline wiring. Same commercial model as advertising - flat monthly, compute à la carte. Discovery is two weeks against real systems before anyone signs a retainer.
Same GPUs, four different jobs
Switch the tab. The recommendation changes. If none of these is your job, say so on the contact form. We will tell you whether rentals, a retainer or a no is the honest answer.
Keep a reserved or bare-metal baseline behind load balancing. Overflow onto on-demand in the same site when traffic spikes. Same image, same network, higher unit price only on the extra seconds.
- H100 / A100 / L40S are the usual SKUs
- vLLM, TensorRT, Triton or your container
- Cross-site failover is opt-in
- Data and weights stay in-country
Farm work that looks like your pipeline
Overnight lighting and animation reviews on L40S or 4090. Pull frames in the morning; do not keep a room of cards idle all day.
Houdini and CPU-heavy caches land on CPU render nodes. GPU renders stay on L40S / 4090. Same account.
A reserved block for the last two weeks of a shot. You are not sharing those nodes with a random on-demand job.
Illustrative week · mix of work on one account
Published SKUs, both sites
Full table including reserved discount math lives on Pricing. Spot is typical. Fabric is InfiniBand at InfiniBand fabric, or 100 GbE (25 GbE on smaller cards) depending on the SKU.
| Instance | Site | VRAM | CPU / RAM | Fabric | On-demand | Spot typ. |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| H100 PCIe 80GB | InfiniBand | 80GB HBM3 | 24 / 200 GB | InfiniBand | $2.19 | $0.66 |
| A100 PCIe 80GB | InfiniBand | 80GB HBM2e | 16 / 180 GB | InfiniBand | $1.24 | $0.37 |
| L40S 48GB | 100 GbE | 48GB GDDR6 | 12 / 128 GB | 100 GbE | $0.86 | $0.26 |
| RTX 4090 24GB | 25 GbE | 24GB GDDR6X | 8 / 64 GB | 25 GbE | $0.41 | $0.12 |
| RTX A6000 48GB | Multi-site | 48GB GDDR6 | 12 / 96 GB | 25–100 GbE | $0.95 | $0.29 |
| CPU render node | Multi-site | 64 / 256 GB | 25 GbE | $0.68 | $0.20 |