>This largely depends on whether you own or rent your hardware. At $40,000 per B200, your lifetime cost per user is 40_000/num_users. In the 100% duty cycle case (worst for cost), that's 6k$ per user. Realistically, serving 300 users per GPU you'll spend a lifetime cost of about $133 per user, plus the datacenter/upkeep bill. If you rent the GPU, the cost is more straightforward. At an hourly rate of $43, your hourly cost per user is 4/num_users. For num_users=300 you get an hourly rate of about $0.013 per user, or $9.36 per month.
This leads me to believe you can buy a GPU but leave it at a data center?
Do people do this? I don't understand. Or are you equating upkeep bill to electricity on premises?
You can, people do. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/activity-7409593739138060288-...
Yes. You can either rent an entire blade, or purchase a dis-assembled box (majority share of the price will be GPU), and place it at a datacenter.
This cannot be done on most premises because of power, noise, and cooling.