NVIDIA GPU rental prices increased by 48% in two months, and AI industry computing power shortage has not been seen in five years

ME News Report, April 13 (UTC+8), the AI industry is experiencing a comprehensive compute supply crisis, with GPU rental prices soaring, frequent service outages, product cuts, and customer churn happening simultaneously. The cloud spot rental price for NVIDIA’s latest Blackwell chips has risen to $4.08 per hour, up from $2.75 two months ago, a 48% increase. Data comes from the compute pricing index published by GPU pricing data provider Ornn, which has recently been incorporated into the Bloomberg Terminal. Cloud infrastructure company Vultr CEO J.J. Kardwell said, “This is the most severe compute shortage I’ve seen in over five years of running this company. Data center construction cycles are too long, and all available power in 2026 has already been booked.” Anthropic is one of the most noticeably affected companies. As of April 8, Claude API’s 90-day uptime was 98.95%, while the industry standard is 99.99%. Enterprise software development platform Retool founder and CEO David Hsu said he believes Opus 4.6 is the best enterprise-level model, but ultimately switched to OpenAI because “Anthropic has been crashing constantly.” In late March, Anthropic began limiting user token consumption from 5 a.m. to 11 a.m. Pacific Time on weekdays. The frequent outages are driven by explosive growth: annual revenue rose from $9 billion at the end of 2025 to $14 billion in February and $30 billion in April, with growth itself exacerbating the supply gap. OpenAI is also making trade-offs. API token processing volume increased from 6 billion per minute in October last year to 15 billion by the end of March. CFO Sarah Friar said, “I spend a lot of time searching everywhere for the last available compute power. We are making some very painful trade-offs, and some projects have been abandoned due to insufficient compute.” Previously, OpenAI shut down the video generation app Sora, partly because chip resources needed to be freed up for programming and enterprise products. GPU cloud service provider CoreWeave raised prices by over 20% at the end of last year and required small and medium clients to sign at least a three-year contract, whereas before it was one year. US bank analysts issued a “Buy” rating last month, believing that the supply-demand imbalance will persist at least until 2029. (Source: BlockBeats)