AI Vocabulary · 02 AI Infrastructure
What is Spot Instance?
Spare cloud capacity sold at a steep discount, which the provider can take back at short notice.
Cloud providers sell machines they are not using as spot instances, also called preemptible instances. AWS advertises discounts of up to 90% on the on-demand price. In return the provider can reclaim the machine at any time; AWS gives two minutes' warning.
GPU providers use the same model. In August 2026 CoreWeave listed an H100 GPU at US$6.16 per hour on demand and US$2.46 as spot, according to list prices compiled by MarkTechPost.
Why it matters for you
Spot suits work that can pause and resume: batch jobs, evaluations, data preparation or fine-tuning that saves its progress often. For a live product that users wait on, the risk of interruption is too high.
Own it
Save progress regularly (checkpoints), so that an interruption costs minutes. Combine spot with on-demand or reserved capacity, and track the effect on your cost per task.
Where it comes from
Discount and warning time come from AWS, Amazon EC2 Spot Instances and Spot Instance interruption notices (vendor). GPU prices as compiled by MarkTechPost (August 2026).
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