The Compute Tightness Index is 55.6/100, a Balanced regime, down 1.9 pts over 30 days as the market loosens. Public rental listings show deep spot discounts—B200 at 43% below on-demand, H200 at 37% below, and H100 at 38% below—signaling slack capacity in AI infrastructure. A multi-cloud catalog cross-check confirms the softness: provisionable regions are near or slightly above baseline norms and secure-tier stock is Low, meaning aggregate GPU supply is currently covering demand. It is the input-side companion to the Token Demand Index (the output — tokens consumed).
← looser · 45 balanced · 60 tight · tighter →
As of 2026-11-12 the blended index sits at 56.8 (Balanced) and has been loosening over the past 30 days (-0.7 pts). Listing-weighted across H100, H200 and B200 by on-demand market depth.
⤓ Download full daily series (CSV)| GPU | On-demand $/hr | Spot $/hr | Spot discount | Listings | CTI | 30d |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| B200 | $7.99 | $4.74 | 41% | 77 | 57.3 | ▲ +6.2 |
| H200 | $5.00 | $3.37 | 33% | 134 | 59.8 | ▼ -4.4 |
| H100 | $3.99 | $2.46 | 38% | 215 | 54.7 | ▼ -1.1 |
Spot discount = how far below on-demand the spot rate trades. A shrinking discount (rising CTI) means spare capacity is drying up; a widening discount (falling CTI) means idle GPUs are being dumped on spot.
Independent reads of the same market, not in the blended score. Datacenter clouds: provider list prices and whether each listed region can be provisioned right now, from a multi-cloud catalog (7% of all listed regions across every GPU type were provisionable at the snapshot, so a GPU's deviation from that norm is the signal, not the absolute share). Marketplace: a large GPU marketplace's lowest on-demand price and its own stock grade, for its datacenter-hosted ("secure") tier and its individually-hosted ("community") tier. As of 2026-11-12.
| GPU | Datacenter clouds | Marketplace · secure | Marketplace · community | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Median list $/hr | p25–p75 | Provisionable / listed | vs catalog | $/hr | Stock | $/hr | Stock | |
| B200 | $6.52 | $6.36–$6.84 | 0 / 15 | +7 pts | $7.99 | Low | — | — |
| H200 | $4.47 | $4.21–$4.52 | 0 / 37 | +7 pts | $5.29 | Low | $3.59 | Low |
| H100 | $2.73 | $2.48–$3.59 | 2 / 78 | +5 pts | $4.39 | Low | — | — |
For each GPU on each day: CTI = 100 × ( 0.8 · spot_avg/on_demand_avg + 0.2 · unavailable/(unavailable + on_demand_listings) ). The scarcity term is the share of listed capacity that has gone dark (clamped to 1). The blended index is the listing-weighted mean across B200, H200 and H100 (weighted by on-demand listing count, a proxy for market depth). Inputs are a daily aggregate of public GPU rental listings across cloud providers — on-demand, reserved and spot medians plus availability — one snapshot per day.
Reading it: <45 loose · 45–60 balanced · 60–80 tight · >80 acute scarcity. The spot-premium term dominates day to day; the availability term only bites when providers actually go dark, so it spikes the index during genuine capacity crunches. Young series (data since 2025-09-01); thresholds will calibrate as history accrues. Full daily history is available as CSV.
This is the input side of the AI-compute economy. For the output side, see the Token Demand Index (tokens consumed + the effective price of inference). Want the underlying rows or to query from an agent? Grab the CSV, or use the Bargo MCP endpoint (get_spot_pricing). See also the research notes and Congress trades.