Methodology

01 What the Series Are

CCIR publishes daily reference series for GPU rental prices, in U.S. dollars per GPU per hour, on the grain chip × operator segment × form factor × interruptibility × commitment term × region. Every price is a posted, publicly observable list ask collected from a provider-operated pricing surface — not an executed transaction, not a solicited quote, not a broker-mediated or sponsored feed. If a price is only available through sales contact, it is not in the index.

02 Operator Segments

Series are segmented by the class of operator posting the price, not by hardware grade:

• Hyperscaler — integrated cloud majors (list rate cards).
• Neocloud — GPU-specialist clouds selling dedicated capacity.
• Marketplace — multi-seller venues and aggregated marketplaces.

In series identifiers these carry the tokens T1 / T2 / T3 respectively.

03 Collection

Prices are collected by automated daily collection from each provider's public pricing pages or application programming interfaces (APIs), early morning U.S. time. Each observation records the provider, chip, posted price, and its axes (form factor, interruptibility, commitment term, region). Raw observations are archived; published series are aggregates.

04 Aggregation and the Headline Statistic

Aggregation is operator-equal: one source, one vote. A provider's multiple qualifying listings in a cell are reduced to a per-source value first, so no provider's listing count moves a series.

The headline statistic per cell follows a disclosed rule: mean when the panel has ten or more sources (n ≥ 10), median below that. The statistic actually used is stamped on every row (headline_stat), and every cell publishes its source count n, observation count, and interquartile range alongside the headline value.

There is no publication gate. Every populated cell publishes, whatever its depth; panel depth n is the trust signal, and thin cells should be read as indicative. This is a deliberate choice: suppressing thin cells hides the coverage boundary instead of disclosing it.

05 Windows and Composition Stability

Each cell is computed on the shortest observation window with data: one day, else three days, else seven. Panel membership is versioned; when a panel member transiently fails collection, its last-good price carries forward for at most seven days so one missed scrape does not change a series' composition. Members absent beyond that exit the cell.

06 Series Grammar

Every Compute Rate Index (CRI) series identifier is fully self-describing:

CRI-{SEGMENT}-{CHIP}-{FORM}-{INT}-{TERM}-{REGION}

SEGMENT   T1 Hyperscaler · T2 Neocloud · T3 Marketplace
FORM      SXM · PCIe · NVL · ALL (pooled)
INT       GTD guaranteed · INT interruptible · ALL (pooled)
TERM      OD on-demand · 1mo 3mo 6mo 1yr 2yr 3yr committed
REGION    US · EU · APAC · ALL (pooled)

Example:  CRI-T2-H100-ALL-GTD-OD-US
          Neocloud · H100 · guaranteed on-demand · United States

ALL on any axis means that axis is pooled for that series. The reference ladder on /rates shows the guaranteed on-demand US cut per chip and segment, with each cell's series identifier printed beneath the rate.

07 Publication, History, Restatement

Series publish daily by 07:30 Eastern Time (ET) at ccir.io. History is append-only with a methodology version stamped on every row. When a defect or a material methodology change requires it, history is restated — republished in full under the current version — per the Change Management Policy.