gpupartner.com — On-prem vs cloud
On-prem when you should, cloud-honest when you shouldn't.
The integrator side has a margin in selling you hardware. We don't want to win deals where cloud is the right answer, it goes wrong for everyone. Here's the honest take.
Rule of thumb in 2026: above ~50–60% sustained utilization over a 24–36 month horizon, on-prem usually wins on $/token. Below that, cloud usually wins. The break-even drops fast as utilization climbs.
A real comparison depends on your power costs, colo terms, your team's ops capacity, and what your cloud bill actually looks like at scale, not the list-rate cards.
Rough TCO calculator
Try the numbers on your situation.
Move the sliders. The default values are public-list rates; they'll get you a directional answer.
Rough TCO model
Cloud rates are public list prices from the major providers (May 2026, approximate). On-prem capex is a placeholder midpoint; opex assumes ~$250/GPU/mo for power + colo + maintenance. The real numbers depend on your site — these get you a directional answer, not a quote.
What fraction of the time the GPUs are actually doing work.
On-prem total (36 mo)
$376K
Capex $304K + opex $72K
Cloud total (36 mo)
$587K
$3.99/GPU/hr × 70% utilization
On-prem wins by $211K over 36 months
Break-even utilization: 45%. Below that, cloud wins; above, on-prem wins. (At your current 70% utilization, on-prem is ahead.)
When cloud actually wins
- Bursty workloads where utilization spends most of the month near zero.
- Early experimentation when you don't know what hardware you want yet.
- Cases where the cloud provider's reserved capacity pricing beats list. Lambda, CoreWeave, and similar all negotiate at scale.
When on-prem wins
- Sustained training or inference at >50% utilization.
- Workloads with data-locality or compliance constraints.
- Teams already running a datacenter footprint at meaningful scale.
- Long-horizon deployments (24+ months) where capex amortizes well.
The calculator above is intentionally a rough cut. For a real comparison, send us your numbers and we'll walk through them with you. No pitch.