Cloud GPU instances bill by the hour, for as long as you use them. If your GPUs run close to 24/7, owning them and colocating usually costs far less per month — you pay a flat fee for power, cooling, space and bandwidth (from $200/kW here, up to 17.3kW per rack) plus a one-time hardware purchase. Use the calculator below with your own numbers.
Cloud has real advantages — flexibility above all. For steady, high-utilization AI workloads the cost structure favors ownership.
| What You're Comparing | Own GPUs + Colocation Columbia Colocation |
AWS / Azure / GCP Cloud GPU instances |
|---|---|---|
| Cost model | Hardware purchase + flat monthly hosting (from $200/kW) | Hourly rental, no upfront cost |
| Cost at 24/7 utilization | Flat — falls to hosting cost after payback | Full hourly rate every hour, indefinitely |
| Bursty or short jobs | Hardware sits idle between jobs | Pay only while running |
| Data egress | No per-GB fees; 50 Mbps per kW included | Typically ~$0.09/GB to the internet |
| Hardware choice | Any GPU server that fits the rack power and cooling | Limited to instance types offered |
| Root / hardware access | Full — BIOS, BMC, networking, storage | Virtualized; limited below the OS |
| Rack power | Up to 17.3kW per rack, 208V 3-phase, air-cooled | Managed by the provider |
| Support | Direct line to the owner, Quincy, WA | Ticket queue by support plan |
| Commitment | Flexible terms, $0 setup | On-demand, or reserved/savings plans for discounts |
AWS typically charges around $0.09 per GB for data leaving its network. Moving 10TB a month out costs roughly $900 in egress alone. Columbia Colocation does not bill per GB: AI and GPU deployments include 50 Mbps per kW (about 16 TB/month per kW) on a 1 Gbps connection.
Starting values are examples, not quotes — replace them with your cloud rate and your hardware price.
For GPUs that run close to 24/7, usually yes. Cloud GPU instances bill hourly for as long as you use them, while colocated servers you own cost a flat monthly fee for power, cooling, space and bandwidth (from $200 per kW at Columbia Colocation) after the upfront hardware purchase. The more continuously you run, the faster ownership wins. For short or bursty jobs, cloud is usually cheaper.
It depends on hardware price and the cloud rate you would otherwise pay. As an illustration, 8 GPUs rented at $3.00 per GPU-hour around the clock cost about $17,520 per month. The same 8 GPUs in a 10kW colocation footprint cost about $2,000 per month to host at $200 per kW. If the server costs $250,000, the monthly difference of roughly $15,520 pays it back in about 16 months. Use the calculator with your own numbers.
AWS typically charges around $0.09 per GB for data leaving its network to the internet, which adds up for large datasets and model artifacts. Columbia Colocation does not bill per GB: AI and GPU deployments include 50 Mbps per kW, billed on 95th-percentile usage, with $2 per Mbps overage.
When demand is bursty or unpredictable, when jobs are short-lived, when you cannot or do not want to buy hardware, or when you depend on managed services such as hosted training platforms or multi-region failover.
No. Columbia Colocation hosts customer-owned hardware only. You buy or lease the servers; we provide up to 17.3kW per air-cooled rack on 208V 3-phase power, plus bandwidth, in Quincy, Washington.
See AI & GPU colocation specs and pricing, full pricing and the colocation pricing guide.
Tell us what you're running on AWS and we'll show you what it would cost here. No sales pressure — just numbers.