Agora evaluated whether to stop renting two GPU servers (each with two NVIDIA H100 PCIe GPUs) and buy its own hardware. Renting costs $7,200/month (~$2.47 per GPU-hour). After collecting seven real quotes for hardware, colocation and connectivity in Madrid and plugging them into a cost model, buying the cheapest equivalent would require about €354,100 upfront (including unrecoverable 21% IVA) and ~€39,850/year to run. Annual savings versus renting are roughly €46,550, but payback on the purchase only arrives just after eight years; with a three-year warranty and a five-year useful life, buying leaves the company about €143,000 behind at year five. The largest determinant is current rental pricing - at a lower on-demand H100 median the purchase would break even in under five years, but at Agora’s rental rate it does not.
The team split the problem into hardware, colocation and connectivity, solicited seven proposals (Iron Mountain, Digital Realty, Colt, Equinix, Data4/Tecnocrática, SIXE, Alhambra IT), and replaced model estimates with quote line items. Colocation monthly totals ranged roughly €2,673-€3,434 for a 5 kW rack; power dominates costs and contract terms (minimum term, annual escalators, rack power phase) materially change lifetime economics. Hardware quotes differed in GPUs and lead times: SIXE offered Supermicro systems with RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell GPUs (€129,500 each) while Alhambra quoted Dell servers with H200 NVL GPUs (€194,932 each). Gaps in quotes, upfront payment demands, and rising rental and component prices kept ownership uneconomic for Agora today.
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