Tweet #162
Deedy @deedydas
There is an absolute barrage of inference providers popping up that get to $1M/mo extremely quickly. This is the rough economics of inference providers: Even if you rent on-demand B300s at $8/GPU-hr, many open source models (GLM 5.3, Kimi K3, DeepSeek 4.1 Flash / Pro) can get you >$10-20/GPU-hr at reasonable throughputs (100tok/s). DeepInfer from DeepSeek directly shows they can get $38/GPU-hr on off-peak hours. Every chip / model has a different throughput / interactivity curve, but there is a lot of arbitrage between even high rental spot prices and token prices. New chips (Vera Rubins) also change this meaningfully. Your ability to be making gross margin relies on your utilization and how good your stack is. Gateways like OpenRouter, Vercel and more help solve that problem by aggregating demand to you. May inference providers discount their tokens to get longer term commits too. I've even heard stories of selling back Chinese model tokens to Chinese labs! One thorn in the econo…
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