SemiAnalysis Weekly

H100 rental prices went up, on a GPU that should be sliding down its depreciation curve. That curve is what lenders underwrite. Daniel Nishball (@dnishball) kicks off our new Compute Capital Markets group by following the money through Nvidia's $497B backstops, ClusterMAX as a credit signal, and whether each token is profitable. Jordan Nanos (@JordanNanos) brings the rental data. AI debt is about to pass auto loans.0:00 Opening1:48 Nvidia's Backstop Universe6:22 The $11T Funding Wall17:25 Balance Sheet as a Service26:27 ClusterMAX as Credit Risk31:51 Why H100 Prices Rose43:09 Token Profitability58:05 You Can't Go Back1:07:25 AI Debt vs Auto Loans1:11:14 Inside Nvidia's Backstops

Pay Anthropic $200 a month and you can pull $12,000 of Opus 5.5 tokens at API pricing. Max Kan (@maxkan) and Andrew Megalaa bought every plan, OpenAI, Meta, xAI, MiniMax, Moonshot, Z.ai, Cursor, and measured every token type to find the ceiling. The catch isn't subsidy. Anthropic still books 50 to 60% gross margins on these plans, which means the API itself is the price gouge.0:00 Cold Open1:03 Subsidies and Credits5:23 Token Types and Cache14:08 Model Value Charts20:51 Test Methodology26:54 Other Plans31:26 Utilization and Limits36:24 Token Efficiency41:24 Open Models44:22 Cyber and CaptureRead More: https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/anthropic-subscriptions-offer-5x

Jordan (@JordanNanos) and Abhilash (@AbhilashJain17) discuss the clients SemiAnalysis consulting serves, custom projects like the inference simulator, how client work turns into research products, neocloud due diligence, and why SLAs decide who gets funded. They also discuss Feynman specs, de-specced memory, and a 20-trillion-parameter OpenAI model. 0:00 Intro and Overview2:27 Client Types5:24 Custom Projects9:47 Strategy Work12:27 Consulting to Products14:33 Neocloud Due Diligence18:40 SLAs and Insurance22:32 Risk Assessments26:45 Build vs Buy29:19 Favorites and Outlook

The InferenceX team is back after two months. Jordan Nanos (@JordanNanos) is joined by Cam Quilici (@noslawextratost), Bryan Shan, and Alec Ibarra to discuss Engram and DRAM offloading, the AgentX benchmark and its profit calculator, TPU v7 on InferenceX, Vera Rubin vs Blackwell, fast tokens, and TileRT on NVIDIA GPUs.0:00 Intro0:31 Engrams12:27 AgentX Benchmark16:36 Profit Calculator23:40 TPU v732:03 Vera Rubin40:49 Fast Tokens49:33 TileRT54:00 Chip Startups1:01:31 Wrap Up

ClusterMAX 3.0 is here. Sam Harshe (@sharshe02) and Pratt Bhatt (@PrathmeshBhat19) join Jordan Nanos (@jordannanos) after months of testing 77 GPU clouds. Some moved up, some moved down. Health checks, cache hit rates, NCCL recipes, agentic coding on clusters, a Linux kernel bug, neocloud security, SLAs and financing, NVIDIA's backstops, five-year-old H100s, and hosted RL training.Read the full ClusterMAX 3.0 report: https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/clustermax-30-the-industry-standardClusterMAX inquiries: [email protected]:00 Cold Open1:32 The Rankings6:58 Health Checks13:26 Endpoint Cache Misses16:40 Networking and NCCL22:52 Vibe-Coded Infra31:27 Bug Hunting38:36 Security45:43 Financing Neoclouds56:33 Hosted Training and RL