A graded registry of GPU cloud prices and fabric disclosure

Compute Assay launched ASSAY-1, a free, versioned specification, registry, and weekly report that defines the GPU-hour as a graded deliverable good, after finding a 3.8× price spread across H100 capacity tracked in its registry. The registry covers 133 listings, with 28 live-API prices from AWS, Azure, Oracle, and Vast refreshed 2026-09-10 and 105 from a weekly survey most recently dated 2026-09-14, and it excludes quote-gated teaser rates such as TensorDock's $2.25 and Voltage Park's $1.99 from headline figures. Compute Assay argues cash-settled GPU futures now listing on four venues price a unit that is not fungible, since substitutability depends on network fabric and workload class rather than chip count alone.

The delivery layer for compute The exchanges built a price for compute. Nobody defined the product. Cash-settled GPU futures are listing on four venues. All of them price the GPU-hour. None can deliver one — because a GPU-hour is not a fungible unit, and whether one cluster can substitute for another is a networking question the financial layer cannot answer. Compute Assay is the specification, registry, and weekly report that define the deliverable. Substitutability is a relation between two fleets with respect to a workload class — not a property of a fleet. Eight H100s on oversubscribed Ethernet and eight in a rail-optimized non-blocking InfiniBand plane are identical goods for batch inference, different goods for large-model serving, and not comparable for frontier training. The indexes count chips. This describes deliverable capacity. — ASSAY-1 §0.1 https://computeassay.com/spec.html One chip. One week. 3.8× price spread. This is not a ripoff chart — it is an undefined-product chart. The green dots publish enough about their network fabric to be underwritten; the red ones publish nothing. The spread is what an unwritten specification costs. Excluded from the chart and spread: TensorDock's "starting at" $2.25; Voltage Park's "starting at" $1.99. Floor and teaser rates — where the bookable price is quote-gated or varies by host — are listed on the H100-SXM page https://computeassay.com/gpus/h100-sxm.html with that label; they never anchor a headline number here. ASSAY-1 — the specificationThe record format, headline metrics CSD·NBD·DCB·PFI , workload classes, substitutability grades, and verification harness that define compute as a deliverable good. Versioned like an RFC. Free forever. spec.html The Delivered Compute ReportWeekly. What GPU capacity actually exists, what it costs, and whether it can do the job the price implies. Every row sourced. report.html Compute has no kilowatt-hourThe frame: why compute is pre-kWh, and the three-step path from a unit of capacity to a unit of delivered intelligence. frame.html The Disclosure LeaderboardProviders ranked by disclosed training-class capacity and fabric transparency — what they state in writing, not measured performance. Re-ranked weekly from public sources. https://computeassay.com/leaderboard.html Run-cost calculatorWhat your training run costs this week, with a disclosed training-class band — from live tracked prices. https://computeassay.com/calculator.html Open dataThe full graded registry as JSON/CSV, free under CC BY 4.0. Every row sourced. https://computeassay.com/data.html Get the Delivered Compute Report One email a week: headline prices, deliverability grades, one teardown, and the gap between the index and what you can actually take delivery of. Subscribe free https://computeassay.substack.com/subscribe Live-API prices 28 listings: AWS, Azure, Oracle, Vast refreshed 2026-09-10 ; the other 105 from the weekly survey, most recently 2026-09-14 . Every row carries its own as of date — staleness is disclosed, never hidden. What an assay is In every physical commodity market, an assay is the test that determines grade and purity — the reason a buyer in one port can trust a cargo loaded in another. Compute has never had one. Eight H100s on shared Ethernet and eight H100s in an NVLink domain with non-blocking InfiniBand sell under the same name at prices that differ by multiples, and the difference is written nowhere a contract can cite. ASSAY-1 is that test, for compute: published free, graded conservatively from what sellers state in writing, and revised in the open.