What are spot GPUs? Complete guide to cost-effective AI infrastructure

Spot GPUs are cloud-based, high-performance graphics processing units offered at significant discounts, ranging from 60% to 90% compared to on-demand pricing, making them an attractive option for AI inference, training jobs, and burst workloads. These GPUs are essentially excess capacity that cloud providers auction off at lower prices, but they come with the risk of interruption when the demand for full-paying customers increases, necessitating sophisticated orchestration to manage interruptions seamlessly. Modern platforms like Northflank automate the management of spot GPUs, providing automatic fallback to on-demand instances and optimizing costs across multiple cloud providers, eliminating the need for manual intervention and complex quota management. While spot GPUs offer substantial cost savings and are suitable for workloads that can tolerate brief interruptions, they pose challenges such as potential unreliability for real-time applications and the need for automated systems to handle interruptions and failover. A real-world example is Weights, an AI platform that scaled to millions of users with spot GPUs, demonstrating how automated orchestration can enable startups to focus on product development rather than infrastructure management.

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