By Daragh Thomas
Publication Date: 2026-09-25 16:43:00
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Demand for NVIDIA Corp. (NASDAQ:NVDA) GPUs has become so intense that even cloud providers with badly functioning infrastructure can still find customers willing to pay healthy margins, according to SemiAnalysis.
“If you’ve got GPUs,” buyers will pay, researcher Sam Harshe said, even if a provider’s Kubernetes, the software used to manage workloads across a cluster, is “completely broken” and its storage “barely works.”
Harshe described “ridiculous backwardation” in the market, with customers paying steep premiums for compute available within weeks rather than waiting several months. The findings come from months of testing 77 GPU-cloud providers and interviews with more than 200 customers for SemiAnalysis’ ClusterMAX 3.0 report.
• NVDA shares are showing limited movement. What’s the outlook for NVDA shares?
Bad Infrastructure Isn’t Stopping Sales
GPU-cloud companies rent GPU clusters to AI developers, handling the networking, storage and software around the chips.
SemiAnalysis ranks them from Platinum to Underperforming based on factors including reliability, performance and support. Just 19 of the 77 providers tested earned a Platinum-through-Bronze “Medallion” rating.
CoreWeave Inc. (NASDAQ:CRWV) and Nebius Group N.V. (NASDAQ:NBIS) ranked Platinum, while Alphabet Inc.’s (NASDAQ:
