Pretraining infrastructure underwriting
Own the cluster?
Price the uptime.
Turn fixed ownership, reserved capacity, and an on-demand parity point into exact utilization-sensitive economics.
Source-stated baseline
Modelfull-use on-demand = owned TCO ÷ parityscenario on-demand = full-use total × utilizationproductive hours = GPUs × years × 8,760 × utilization
Cheapest pathWaiting
Savings vs next best-
Owned TCO-$/productive GPU-hour
Reserved TCO-$/productive GPU-hour
On-demand at utilization-Derived from parity
Productive hours77% parity85% utilization
Run a scenario to inspect exact outcomes.
Decision boundaryModeled inputs only. Add power, facilities, financing, staff, networking, downtime, resale, contract terms, and delivery risk to owned TCO before procurement.
Utilization earns the economics. Operations earn the utilization.
Owning is a fixed-cost bet that pretraining demand stays high enough to keep the cluster productive.
The source's 77% figure is parity with on-demand, not automatically with reserved capacity.
InfiniBand, scheduling, monitoring, staffing, and supply timing remain outside this simple model unless priced into owned TCO.