Crusoe Cloud vs PowerGPU at a glance
Crusoe Cloud
AI cloud built on stranded and flared energy: H100, H200, A100, L40S on a published rate card
PowerGPU
Fixed prices at market median × 0.70, crypto only, verified datacenters
| Crusoe Cloud | PowerGPU | |
|---|---|---|
| Billing | Hourly on-demand; reserved/committed capacity quoted by sales | Per second, no minimum, price locked at deploy |
| Payment | Not published on the pricing or product pages | Crypto only — USDT (TRC-20/ERC-20), BTC, XMR, LTC, ETH, TRX, SOL |
| Identity | Not published beyond standard account sign-up | Email + password. No KYC, no card, no stored IP addresses |
| Free credit | $5 credit for Crusoe Intelligence Foundry (serverless fine-tuning/inference) — not a general compute credit | None — every hour is ≥30% under the market median instead |
| Cheaper tier | Reserved capacity via sales, described as the lowest rates; spot listed as a capacity option with no published discount | Interruptible flat −50% (no auction) · reserved −35% (3+ months) |
| Regions | 5 regions — Houston, Virginia and Nevada (US), plus Iceland and Norway (Europe); gigawatt-scale campuses such as Abilene, TX are sold as separate dedicated deals | 32 regions on 5 continents, verified datacenters only |
| Minimums | None published for on-demand GPU instances | None — 1× to 8× GPUs at the same per-GPU price |
| Storage | Persistent disk $0.08/GiB/month · shared disk $0.07/GiB/month · S3-compatible object storage $0.06/GiB/month | $0.08/GB/month NVMe, volumes survive instances |
| Egress | Free — no charge for network ingress or egress | $0.01/GB in and out, every region |
| Access | Console, CLI, REST API, Terraform and SDKs; Crusoe Managed Kubernetes and Managed Slurm for clusters | Containers or full KVM VMs, SSH, Jupyter, REST API, CLI, Python SDK |
Crusoe Cloud column: as published on crusoe.ai on 2026-09-04. Details change — verify before you decide.
Crusoe Cloud vs PowerGPU prices, GPU by GPU
Public on-demand list prices per GPU-hour on Crusoe Cloud's pricing page (2026-09-04) against PowerGPU's fixed rates today — every PowerGPU price is the public marketplace median × 0.70, rounded down, re-checked weekly.
| GPU | Crusoe Cloud list | PowerGPU on-demand | PowerGPU interruptible | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| H200 HGX H200, 141 GB | $4.29 | $2.791 | $1.395 | −35% on PowerGPU |
| H100 SXM HGX H100, 80 GB | $3.90 | $1.428 | $0.714 | −63% on PowerGPU |
| A100 SXM4 80 GB SXM | $2.30 | $0.560 | $0.280 | −76% on PowerGPU |
| A100 PCIE 80 GB PCIe | $2.00 | $0.374 | $0.187 | −81% on PowerGPU |
| L40S 48 GB | $1.50 | $0.514 | $0.257 | −66% on PowerGPU |
Configurations differ (node sizes, tiers, regions); the note beside each card says which Crusoe Cloud price is quoted. Negative differences mean Crusoe Cloud is cheaper on that card.
When to stay with Crusoe Cloud
- You need AMD MI300X ($3.45/hr published) or MI355X, or Blackwell-class B200/GB200 NVL72 rack-scale capacity — PowerGPU's catalog is NVIDIA GPU instances up to B300, not AMD accelerators or Grace-Blackwell superchip racks.
- Unconditional free bandwidth, not just a low flat rate, is a hard requirement for a very egress-heavy workload.
- Sourcing compute from stranded and flared energy specifically matters for your own sustainability reporting.
Why teams switch to PowerGPU
- Price: the H100 HGX is fixed at market median × 0.70 here versus $3.90/hr at Crusoe on-demand, and the H200 gap is wider still ($4.29/hr).
- No card or KYC anywhere in Crusoe's public pricing or product pages — top up in crypto and deploy.
- 32 regions on five continents versus Crusoe's 5, concentrated in the US and two Nordic countries.
- A flat −50% interruptible tier and a published −35% reserved tier from 3 months, instead of a "contact sales for our lowest rates" reserved tier.
Switching from Crusoe Cloud: what maps to what
| On Crusoe Cloud | On PowerGPU |
|---|---|
| On-demand GPU instance | Instance, 1× to 8× GPUs at the same per-GPU price |
| Reserved/committed capacity (sales quote) | Reserved instance, flat −35% from 3 months, no sales call |
| Crusoe Managed Kubernetes / Managed Slurm | Clusters — InfiniBand-connected multi-node pods on request |
| Persistent disk / object storage | Volume, $0.08/GB/month |
pip install powergpu
export POWERGPU_API_KEY=pg_live_… # console → API keys
powergpu launch --gpu h200 --template pytorch --disk 100 --volume data:/data
# ✓ instance i-52ab77c1 running (24.1s) · $2.791/hr · per second
powergpu stop i-52ab77c1 # billing ends this secondData moves the boring way: rsync or rclone from your Crusoe Cloud machine to a PowerGPU volume, which then mounts on every future instance in seconds. Templates for PyTorch, vLLM, ComfyUI and Ollama are official images; anything else runs from its OCI reference.
A real month, costed
| Scenario | Crusoe Cloud | PowerGPU |
|---|---|---|
| 1× H200, 730 hours on-demand | $3,132 | $2,037 |
| 1× H200, 8 h/day × 20 days | $686 | $447 |
| Same 160 hours, PowerGPU interruptible | — | $223 |
| 500 GB of storage, one month | Persistent disk $0.08/GiB/month · shared disk $0.07/GiB/month · S3-compatible object storage $0.06/GiB/month | $40 |
Run your own schedule through the cost calculator — it adds storage and bandwidth and compares against the marketplace median.
Crusoe alternative: FAQ
Is PowerGPU cheaper than Crusoe Cloud?
Yes on every published overlapping card: Crusoe prices the H100 HGX at $3.90/hr, the H200 HGX at $4.29/hr, the A100 SXM at $2.30/hr and the A100 PCIe at $2.00/hr on-demand (checked 2026-09-04); PowerGPU fixes all of them at the public market median × 0.70. Crusoe's B200 and GB200 NVL72 are contact-sales only, with no published rate to compare.
Does Crusoe really not charge for bandwidth?
Correct — Crusoe Cloud states it does not charge for network ingress or egress (checked 2026-09-04), the one place its published terms beat PowerGPU's flat $0.01/GB.
What happened to Crusoe's bitcoin-mining business?
Sold to NYDIG in late 2024. Crusoe started in 2018 by burning stranded, otherwise-flared oil-well gas to power mining rigs; after the sale it kept the power strategy and put it entirely behind AI cloud and dedicated "AI Factory" campuses instead.
Try the switch for the price of a coffee
Top up $40 in USDT or Monero, deploy the same image you run on Crusoe Cloud, and benchmark it. No card, no KYC, per-second billing — stop it the minute you are done.
Crusoe Cloud and its logo are trademarks of their owner, used here only to identify the compared service; PowerGPU is not affiliated with Crusoe Cloud. NVIDIA GPU names are trademarks of NVIDIA Corporation.
