A richer model on the same days still falls short.
Out-of-sample, the richer model still could not close the gap. The explainability page carries the current bound.
The price of one GPU-hourFile copy · not for publication
Identical hardware.Quoted the same day.Priced worlds apart.
Basis studies what makes identical compute cost differently — and how much of that difference observable facts still cannot explain. Every figure traces back to the raw response a provider returned.
H100 SXM 80GB · live quotes momentarily unavailable
Open the findings01 · The briefA study, not a product
Commodities convergetoward a price.GPU-hours don’t.
An H100 SXM 80GB has the same silicon wherever you rent it.1 Region, commitment, and contract structure explain part of the spread — but once those observable differences are accounted for, prices ought to converge. They don’t. Not even close.
Nobody had published, on public data, with a method you can rerun, how much of that dispersion is actually explainable. So we started asking twice a day, and writing down every answer.
Sample receipt
Every figure traces back to a raw provider response — no paywalled feeds.
02 · Exhibit A
Two quotes for the sameH100 SXM 80GB.
Live quotes are momentarily unavailable. The dispersion page keeps the full record.
03 · The name
The gap has a name.
In commodity markets, basis names the gap between a local cash price and the relevant futures price — the part geography, timing, and contract terms cannot standardize away.2 Traders have a word for the gap between a reference price and the price realized in a particular market. We borrow it for compute.
If GPU compute is becoming a commodity, it appears to carry a basis of its own. In this study, Basis is the share of quoted price dispersion that remains after provider, region, commitment, and other observable terms are accounted for — not the raw spread between two quotes, but the part normalization still cannot explain.
04 · The method
Twice a day. Four steps.Every answer kept.
Collect → file → canonicalize → account. The full procedure is documented separately.
- 01Collect08:00 / 20:00 UTC
- 02Fileraw, immutable
- 03Canonicalizerule-based only
- 04Accountvariance decomposition
05 · Exhibit B
One collection day.One canonical GPU.
Today’s quotes are momentarily unavailable. The dispersion page carries the daily record.
06 · Exhibit C
The settlement sheet. One hundredunits of disagreement, filed againstwhat sellers disclose.
Sample populationmarket-priced · Azure and Google Cloud excluded
Where the machine is. How it’s rented. Who sells it. What comes bundled with it. Everything observable, accounted for, and still a share of the price has no explanation.
Change the order of the factors and the four credits move. The remainder does not. That is why the remainder is the headline. The ledger it comes off, filed row by row, is on the Basis page.
07 · Findings of recordSubject · observable boundBound, not victory Subject · host identityIdentity, not specs Subject · the moving shareA range, not a favorite
Three sheets that survived review.
The remainder isn’t only noise. It persists by host.
The host panel is momentarily unavailable. The explainability page holds it.
The number moves. We publish the range it moves in.
The daily series is momentarily unavailable. The findings page tracks it.
- Limitation L1Quoted prices, not transactions. Negotiated and realized prices are not observed.
- Limitation L2A marketplace and a hyperscaler are not like-for-like populations.
Somebody is about to writethe rules for how computegets priced.
You can’t build financial plumbing on a price you can’t explain. There is growing interest in treating AI compute like a commodity, with indexes, futures and contracts on top of it.3 All of that assumes a GPU-hour has a knowable market price. That unexplained remainder is the risk any benchmark would silently absorb.
It’s a study, not a product
Nothing for sale, no paid feed as a required input. Public quotes and a method you can rerun.
Every number has a receipt
Headline share, contributing offers, raw response, exact rules applied. Four clicks, no exceptions.
Honest about limits
One collection outage found, published, root-caused and turned into a standing alarm rather than smoothed away.
The file is open
It is not asking to be believed. It is asking to be checked.
I was just bored and curious. So here it is: github.com/RajTrivedi06/Basis
— Raj
Sources
- Hardware identity within a canonical SKU: normalization rules and variant separation — Basis methodology §3 (canonical schema).
- Commodity basis — cash price minus futures price; CME Group education materials on basis and hedging.
- Compute-as-commodity framing — Ornn AI public materials; the essays referenced in the original Basis proposal.
The GPU spread itself is our own live data. See the dispersion page.