GPU scarcity lifts rental prices

ASML raised its 2026 sales outlook on April 15 as demand for artificial intelligence chips rippled back to the machines used to make them. (asml.com) (reuters.com) The Dutch company reported first-quarter 2026 net sales of €8.8 billion and net income of €2.8 billion a day earlier, after saying in January it expected 2026 sales of €34 billion to €39 billion. Reuters reported on April 15 that ASML lifted that 2026 revenue outlook to €36 billion to €40 billion. (asml.com) (reuters.com) ASML sells lithography tools, the factory machines that print chip circuits onto silicon wafers. When cloud groups and model developers order more Nvidia accelerators, chipmakers need more production capacity, and that pushes demand upstream to ASML’s equipment. (asml.com 1) (asml.com 2) At the other end of the chain, the same shortage has turned graphics processing units into rented infrastructure. Cloud providers and specialist platforms now sell access by the hour, with current list prices showing an Nvidia H100 at $3.99 per hour on Lambda and an eight-chip H100 system at $49.24 per hour on CoreWeave, or about $6.16 per chip. (lambda.ai) (coreweave.com) Newer Blackwell chips already rent for more. Lambda lists an Nvidia B200 at $6.69 per hour, while CoreWeave lists an eight-chip B200 system at $68.80 per hour, or $8.60 per chip. (lambda.ai) (coreweave.com) That pricing sits inside a larger build-out. The Financial Times reported that Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon and Meta planned to spend more than $300 billion on capital expenditures in 2025 as the race for artificial intelligence data centers accelerated. (ft.com) Those facilities are denser and more power-hungry than older cloud sites because the chips cost far more and draw far more electricity. The Financial Times cited Gartner estimating $475 billion of data-center spending in 2025, up 42 percent from 2024. (ft.com) The result is a market that looks less like ordinary cloud computing and more like commercial leasing: a handful of owners control scarce hardware, and customers pay premiums for immediate access. ASML’s higher forecast and the posted rental rates point to the same constraint in different places — too many buyers chasing too little high-end compute. (reuters.com) (lambda.ai) (coreweave.com)