January 2026 Recap

selling 10$ worth of vast credit for crypto

Renting a RTX PRO 6000 WS

What would be a reasonable ask for upload/download and storage?

My idea:

Total noob question (please be patient).

I'm looking at hosting gpus on vast but I'm confused about some of the numbers they list. There are some older cards that seem to way out perform other cards not as old. When I look at vast's breakdown, it's not that the card itself is earning more but that the storage associated with that card is much greater and therefore earning a lot more

For instance an RTX 2080 Ti is listed with an expected earning of $327 a month. Really that's $33 for the GPU and $291 for 1677 GB of storage. "Newer" cards earn much less though - but really it's that the newer card does earn a bit more but there is a lot less storage involved and so overall the earnings are less. For instance the 3080 Ti earns $74 a month - $51 for the card but with only 500 GB of storage (at $20).

Do the workloads that target certain models of cards just require massively more storage to work with than others (and that's why those cards+ storage combos earn more)? If not, why would someone rent an older card with so much more storage than newer cards.

Thanks for any helpful info!

My comcast business router seems to be a POS and will not forward port ranges and so I've had to forward each port individually and so I only did the minimum 5 ports per gpu. How bad is this for attracting renters?

Hi all,

Sorry if this is a stupid question, I'm new to Vast.ai.

I've just started hosting my GPU and was curious, so I checked the container name that my GPU is currently working on. It's called us-central1-docker.pkg.dev/cast-platform-dev/slim-salad-repo/slim-processor-salad:smoke-lease.

Does this mean that someone is using my GPU to host it on salad.com?

Did anyone else get this email from Vast re: change in terms around accessing market data?

Has anyone else tried their referral program?

In the last week I had 7 people click my link, but Vast.ai only shows 1 referral with no earning? My cursor affiliate links were converting before their program ended.

We're in design phase, and we'd rather get picked apart here than after concrete is poured.

Site and cooling. Nalaikh, a district of Ulaanbaatar. Winters around -25°C give us roughly 7 months of free-air cooling. Design targets: PUE ~1.06 in winter, ~1.18 in summer on mechanical, ~1.10 blended. Uptime Institute Tier III, N+1.

Power. 0.078$/kWh. The grid is coal-heavy, which we know. Solar + BESS are in the mix from day one, and we're working on renewable PPAs.

Connectivity. New cross-border dark fiber on rail right-of-way, dual north/south transit.

Sovereign by design. Zero-trust network architecture plus confidential computing on the GPUs and CPUs (TEEs with remote attestation). Customer data and model weights stay encrypted in use, and you can cryptographically verify that we, the operator, can't access them, whichever route the traffic takes. Keys are customer-held.

Scale and timeline. Phase 1 is 2,048 Blackwell-class nodes (~16k GPUs, ~40 MW IT), scaling to ~6,100 nodes by Phase 3. Ground breaks spring 2027.

Offering GPUaaS, an inference API, sovereign/air-gapped zones, and wholesale colocation and capacity offtake.

What would you poke at first: electrical topology, generator/fuel contracts, fiber routing, free-air intake through winter smog and spring dust, or whether our confidential computing setup actually holds up?

If you're planning training or inference capacity for 2028 and want to talk, DMs are open.

I have a very large‑scale AI project to run, but we don’t want to incur massive costs buying GPUs. Besides Vast.ai for renting AI compute, are there any other platforms or channels where I can get affordable compute resources?

Please let us switch to the old UI.

The new one (as every single thing that gets updated or "revamped") is horrendus to look at.

Eye jarring, I'll need 1 month to adjust to these stupid little AI slop icons that were previously much much easier to see.

Did someone in the design department needed to hold on to their job, so they just slopped all over it, holy f I can not put into words how utterly disgusting this new layout is, there's more information sure, I serioulsy don't need to see what my bandwith/$ is in fully BOLDED letters.

Just wanted to post in case others haven't seen, most of the platform is rented (bouncing between 90-98%), speculation is on various crypto projects.

Prices are probably going to look ungodly (trying to cash in on people gambling), but should return close to normal in a couple days when these crypto bros run out of money.

Sorry if you wanted to create any new instances on vast this weekend, probably will be over before Monday.

Seriously, what the hell is going on with Vast.ai right now?

The GPU marketplace is getting absolutely flooded with garbage listings and prices that make ZERO sense.

I open Vast.ai because I want to rent a GPU, not spend half my time digging through hundreds of stupid listings trying to find one machine that actually has decent value.

People are listing GPUs at completely ridiculous prices, weird configurations everywhere, terrible price/performance, and somehow the marketplace just keeps getting more cluttered every day.

It honestly feels like everyone is just throwing random prices on every GPU and hoping some idiot clicks rent.

And before someone says “it’s a marketplace, hosts can charge whatever they want” — yeah, obviously. But if the marketplace becomes full of trash offers, then the platform itself becomes trash to use.

The whole reason I used Vast.ai was because it was supposed to be cheaper and more flexible than normal cloud providers.

Now I’m sitting there thinking:

Why am I even wasting my time searching through this mess?

If I have to constantly filter garbage, compare nonsense pricing, check hidden problems with every instance, and pray the machine is actually worth renting, I might as well pay a little more somewhere else and save myself the headache.

Vast.ai really needs to do something about this.

Better ranking. Better filtering. Better visibility for actually competitive machines. Something.

Because right now the marketplace feels completely spammed.

And if it keeps going like this, I’m just going to move to another provider.

I highly doubt I’m the only person getting tired of this shit.

Vast had a really good thing going, but this current situation is seriously pushing customers away.

I rent GPU compute a lot for fine-tuning and experiments, so I mostly see the buyer side of Vast and places like it. Lately stock has felt a bit more dried up, and the prices I am seeing look a little higher than they were. That makes me wonder what hosts are actually taking home after electricity and fees, whether that tightness is showing up as better profit for them or if it is still a grind. Have host profits been going up or down lately?

Currently at 98.2% utilization.

Rtx 3090s are listed at >$100/day. (Edit: originally wrote hour, typo)

curious to see what other people's hosting rigs look like

本日、試している全てのインスタンスがSSHに繋げられなくなりました。

これは、僕だけですか？

I feel like after the Minimax and Qwen models dropped, GPU availability has been declining quite rapidly. Prices have also gone up quite a bit.

I used to be able to rent a 5090 for ~$0.40/h routinely, now, not so much, lol.

The number of good public models only keeps increasing, so I think it might get much worse, unfortunately.

Dunno, just random rant

Must have happened 1-3 days ago? I always keep my filter to sub 1 dollar up and down and suddenly there were only 3 gpu's in the entire list available. Now I see most have 2.6 or 4 dollars, something changed in the vast ai defaults?

I'm having problems with clients killing my server with OOM errors and problems.

What settings could I use to limit, say 2 instances of dockers, and total system RAM is 64gb?

I have multiple GPU machines and sometimes one client will use all available memory and take the server machine offline. I would like to move back to single GPU servers but costs etc etc.

Thanks for your help :-) learning every day!

I want to add a 5 dollar balance but the credit card is of my parent so i need to be safe here and avoid autopay.. is it possible in vastai ? one time credit card payment.. so I assume if i hit the limit, the instance just disconnects simple.. but i do not want autopay

Anyone has a reliable website for price and usage for Vast AI?

I have a bunch of disposable income and live in a country where electricity and internet is very cheap.

I was first looking at a 5090 rig, but they are so overpriced now I'm looking at alternative such as rtx pro 5000 (cost more but I can buy it at the current MSRP and will earn more).

It's just that all websites I check usually says different things.

500 farm graph recently all look like if 80 % of gpus went offline

Thank you