SemiAnalysis: H100 Spot Rental Price Decline Not Due to AI Demand Cooling Off, Long-Term Contract Prices Continue to Rise

BlockBeats News, June 26th. Semiconductor and AI independent research firm SemiAnalysis published an article stating that the spot rental price of H100 cloud instances has dropped to $2.42 per hour, a decrease of about 40% from the peak in May this year. This has raised concerns in the market about whether the demand for AI computing power and investment enthusiasm in artificial intelligence have cooled down. However, spot prices more reflect short-term supply and demand changes and cannot represent the true demand trend in the AI computing power market.

In contrast to the spot market, the price of a 1-year H100 long-term leasing contract has continuously risen from around $1.70 per hour at the end of last year to the current level of about $2.65. Analysts believe that the spot and on-demand market mainly serve concept verification (POC), one-time tests, sudden workloads, and temporary capacity expansion needs, while long-term contracts mainly correspond to continuous inference and model training in production environments. This is the core market for AI enterprises to stably deploy computing power, and therefore, it can better reflect real and continuous business needs.

The decrease in spot prices and the increase in long-term contract prices do not indicate a weakening demand for AI but rather show that the market demand is gradually shifting from short-term experimental usage to long-term, scaled deployment. As more and more enterprises lock in long-term computing resources to support continuous operations and commercialization of AI applications, the prices of long-term contracts continue to rise. This also signifies that AI infrastructure investment is transitioning from the experimental stage to the production stage.

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