Capacity brokers, reserved contracts, secondary and spot markets
Ways to secure capacity ahead of time, buy it through an intermediary, or take spare capacity cheaply.
Definition, not a sourced statistic
What it is
Reserved contracts commit you to capacity for a term so that it is there when you need it. Capacity blocks book a fixed amount for a fixed window. Brokers and aggregators find and arrange capacity across several providers for you. Spot and interruptible markets sell spare capacity that can be taken back. A secondary market lets someone resell capacity they reserved but do not need.
Who it suits
- Teams with a planned training run or launch date.
- Buyers who want help finding large clusters across providers.
- Work that can stop and resume, for the spot and interruptible end.
Common contract shapes
- Reserved or committed term. Capacity or spend committed over a term.
- Capacity block. A fixed amount booked for a fixed window in advance.
- Brokered contract. An intermediary arranges capacity with one or more providers.
- Spot or interruptible. Spare capacity on terms that let the provider take it back.
- Resale. Capacity passed on by a buyer who no longer needs it, where terms allow.
Providers use their own names for these shapes, so compare what is promised, not what it is called. The contract shapes guide explains each one.
What to ask
- Egress and data transfer. Are data transfer charges included in the reserved terms or billed on top?
- Service levels. Is the start date guaranteed, and what do you get if capacity is late, short or fails?
- Data residency and access. With a broker, which provider and site will you actually get, and can you refuse a substitute?
- Security certifications. Whose certifications apply: the broker’s or the underlying provider’s?
- Export controls and sanctions. Does the broker check that the end provider and location are cleared for your use?
- Exit. Can the reservation be cancelled, resized or resold, and what does that cost?
- Is "reserved" a billing discount or a physical set-aside of machines?
- With spot, how much notice before the provider takes the machine back?
The full list is on the printable buyer's checklist. For rules on chips and where they can go, see export controls and compute thresholds.
On this site
Entries listed here because their own summary or checked facts on this site fit this type. An entry can fit more than one type, and a provider missing here may still offer it. This is a list, not a ranking, and in name order. We link to providers for prices.
Providers
- Alibaba Cloud: A global cloud platform with elastic virtual servers including GPU instances, and the Model Studio AI service.
- Amazon Web Services (EC2): The virtual server service of a very large general-purpose cloud. It covers a wide catalogue of instance types, including accelerated options for machine learning.
- Cirrascale Cloud Services: A cloud provider offering private AI training and inference on several accelerator families, including AMD, NVIDIA, Qualcomm and Tenstorrent.
- Fireworks AI: A training and inference platform for open models, with serverless, on-demand and reserved deployment tiers.
- Genesis Cloud: A cloud provider offering GPU and CPU virtual machines with attachable storage volumes. It describes its infrastructure as run on renewable energy.
- Google Cloud (Compute Engine): Google's virtual machine service. Besides GPUs, it is the place to reach Google's own Cloud TPU accelerators for machine learning.
- Hyperbolic: A GPU access platform drawing on a network of compute suppliers. It offers on-demand GPUs, reserved clusters and private cloud, plus an OpenAI-compatible API for model serving.
- Hyperstack (NexGen Cloud): An on-demand GPU cloud run under the NexGen Cloud group. It provides GPU virtual machines, object storage and managed Kubernetes.
- Jarvislabs: An India-based GPU cloud offering virtual machines, clusters, model APIs and managed inference endpoints.
- Microsoft Azure: Microsoft's cloud virtual machine service, with GPU-enabled and HPC-oriented machine types alongside general-purpose ones.
- Prime Intellect: An AI development platform combining a post-training lab, inference API and a compute offering that sources GPUs from multiple cloud providers.
- RunPod: A GPU platform offering pods, serverless GPU endpoints and multi-node clusters from a shared catalogue in many regions.
- Shadeform: A single console and billing relationship for provisioning GPUs from many separate cloud providers.
- UpCloud: A Finnish cloud provider offering cloud servers, GPU servers, managed databases and Kubernetes, with data centres in Europe, North America and Asia Pacific.
- Vast.ai: A marketplace where hosts, from individuals to data centres, list GPUs and renters choose among them.
- Verda: A cloud platform for AI workloads, offering GPU instances, InfiniBand clusters and serverless GPU containers. Storage options include block storage and a shared filesystem.
- Voltage Park: A GPU cloud offering NVIDIA H100, B200 and GB300 capacity, either on demand or under longer reserved contracts.
Gap This site has not yet recorded any provider’s own page for a capacity block product, or a public secondary market for resale.
Related
- Glossary: Reserved, Capacity block, Spot, On-demand.
- Guide: What is a capacity block, and the other contract shapes
- Guide: How to get GPUs this week
- Provider directory
- Compare offer types
Other offer types: Hyperscale cloud instances · GPU clouds and bare metal · Marketplaces and aggregators · Decentralised and community networks · Regional and sovereign clouds · Managed inference and serverless GPU · Chip-maker and accelerator clouds · National and institutional HPC, and free or funded programmes · Colocation, wholesale, powered shell and build-to-suit · On-premises hardware, and leasing or financing it · Edge and telecom sites, and converted sites
Definitions and questions written in our own words, checked on 3 October 2026 and due for review by 3 January 2027. Sourced facts stay on the provider, programme and policy pages this page links to. This is general information to help you ask better questions. It is not legal, tax or procurement advice. For export controls, sanctions and contracts, check the primary rules and talk to a qualified adviser. Something wrong? Tell us.