The Sorso View Compute Index is a constructed public benchmark. It starts with public provider pricing, applies a fixed inclusion gate, normalizes included observations to USD per GPU-hour, calculates tier medians, and combines those medians into a base-100 index. This page states the locked v1.1 method used across the series, including Amendment A1-R1, effective with Issue 007, which changes capture cadence without changing the core formulas or inclusion gate.
Every benchmark of consequence does the same thing. It takes raw inputs the world produces in disorder and constructs from them a single number the world can cite. The S&P 500 is not a list of five hundred stock prices. The Consumer Price Index is not a survey of grocery receipts. Case-Shiller is not the average sale price of homes. Each is a method, a particular way of weighting, normalizing, and combining inputs, that turns noise into signal. The method is the asset. The number is the output.
The Sorso View Compute Index applies that principle to public AI compute pricing. Twenty-seven providers. Three tiers. A fixed launch baseline. A public evidence trail. The result is not a quote and not a procurement recommendation. It is a public-price benchmark with recurring issue publication and a two-track capture cadence.
What the Index measures.
The Index measures public, on-demand rental pricing for the NVIDIA H100 SXM 80GB anchor configuration, normalized to USD per GPU-hour, across the twenty-seven-provider panel. When a provider only publishes a multi-GPU instance price, the instance price is divided by the number of GPUs to produce a per-GPU equivalent. That equivalent is a comparison unit, not a claim that the provider sells a single GPU from that node.
The measured layer is the public leverage layer: the visible rate card, public price page, or public pricing table that buyers can point to before negotiation. Private contract prices, reserved-capacity prices, spot markets, inference-token prices, and alternative-silicon prices are not blended into the headline SVCI.
The provider panel.
The headline panel contains twenty-seven providers in three fixed tiers. Tier 1 contains four hyperscalers. Tier 2 contains eighteen NVIDIA GPU clouds and neoclouds. Tier 3 contains five marketplace, aggregator, or market-clearing surfaces. The tier assignment controls the denominator for coverage and the tier median used in SVCI.
- Tier 1, Hyperscale: AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
- Tier 2, GPU clouds and neoclouds: purpose-built GPU cloud operators and AI infrastructure clouds, including CoreWeave, Crusoe, Lambda, Nebius, Together AI, Hyperstack, Verda, and others.
- Tier 3, market-clearing layer: RunPod, Vast.ai, Paperspace, TensorDock, and Shadeform.
Capture cadence.
A1-R1 establishes two capture tracks and one observation class.
Track 1, full sweep, monthly. A complete fresh capture of all twenty-seven panel providers, priced and excluded, runs on a monthly clock, due on or about thirty days after the last sealed full sweep. The full sweep re-verifies every exclusion and refreshes every baseline.
Track 2, priced capture, weekly or biweekly. Between full sweeps, issues freshly observe every provider priced in the most recent sealed full sweep or in a later sealed issue. Excluded providers are not recaptured in Track 2. Their dispositions carry from the most recent sealed full sweep, and every Track 2 issue discloses that full-sweep date and the date the next full re-verification is due.
Priced-provider observation issue. A priced-provider observation issue freshly captures the providers that currently publish qualifying fixed public rates. Panel entries outside the scheduled capture are recorded as deferred, not reviewed, carried, priced, or excluded. Because the complete panel is not adjudicated, Coverage Score and the Compute Opacity Index are not calculated for that issue. A priced-provider observation issue discloses the date of the most recent sealed full sweep and the date the next full re-verification is due. This clarification is effective with Issue 009.
Skip rule. A skipped weekly or biweekly slot does not force a full sweep. The full sweep runs on its own monthly clock regardless of how many slots were skipped. Skipped slots are disclosed in the next issue's movement-basis statement.
The tiers remain classification and weighting groups, not separate publication schedules. Tier medians in a Track 2 or priced-provider observation issue are computed only from fresh priced observations. Carried entries are exclusions only.
Current cadence position. The full sweep previously scheduled for on or about August 21 was completed in Issue 008, published August 16, 2026. Issue 009 is a subsequent priced-provider observation issue. The next Track 1 full-panel sweep is due on or about September 15, 2026.
The capture window.
Each issue has a fixed pre-publication capture window, and the exact run dates are recorded in that issue's data layer. The method does not require a specific weekday. Issue 004, for example, used a June 28 to July 1 capture window. Once the analytical layer is locked, later provider-page movement is handled in the next issue or through a formal correction trigger.
Source pages are captured directly from provider surfaces when possible. Headline observations must come from logged-out public surfaces. Signed-in pages, API payloads, and supplemental context may support internal review, but they do not establish a headline rate and do not override the public-source inclusion gate.
Provider communications and advance notices.
Directed provider emails, subscriber notices, sales messages, and account communications are not public rate surfaces. They cannot supply an official rate, enter a tier median, move the SVCI, or override public evidence. They may be retained privately as advance notices and used only to schedule a targeted public recapture. The official observation is what the public surface shows during the capture window.
The inclusion gate.
A provider enters a tier median only when it publishes a comparable public H100 SXM 80GB on-demand rate, or a fixed public instance-hour rate that can be normalized to a per-GPU-hour equivalent. The rate must be attributable to the provider's own public surface, be current during the capture window, and be clear enough to reproduce.
The following are captured but excluded from medians: quote-only prices, contact-sales gates, reserved or committed-use prices, spot or interruptible prices, starting-from floors, host-variable marketplace prices, auction prices, aggregator pass-through prices, incompatible product modes, private-console-only observations, and public pages that do not identify the anchor configuration clearly.
A public promotional on-demand price may enter only if it is presented as the current public on-demand rate and is not conditional on a commitment term. Paperspace in Issue 004 is the controlling example: the visible 3-year commitment rate was rejected, while the provider's footnote-attested public on-demand H100 rate was included.
Tier 3 and marketplace observations.
Tier 3 exists because marketplaces and aggregators are economically important, but Tier 3 status does not automatically make marketplace prices comparable. A Tier 3 observation still has to clear the inclusion gate. Fixed public rates from a provider-controlled surface can enter. Host-set floors, live marketplace offers, percentile distributions, provider-pass-through cards, and rates that vary by host are evidence, not median inputs.
The issue may explicitly admit a Tier 3 marketplace observation only by naming the observation, the statistic used, and the reason it is comparable. No such exception was invoked for Vast.ai, TensorDock, or Shadeform in Issue 004. RunPod and Paperspace entered because the issue record treated their captured rates as fixed public on-demand rates; Vast.ai, TensorDock, and Shadeform were captured-excluded because their surfaces were marketplace, host-variable, or aggregator pass-through.
The SVCI formula.
Each tier median is calculated from included observations in that tier. The median is used because public AI compute pricing has outliers, gaps, and mixed product surfaces. Averages would overreact to extremes and to temporary availability artifacts.
Issue 001 base medians: T1 10.5306, T2 3.55, T3 4.62.
Locked tier weights: T1 0.45, T2 0.45, T3 0.10.
Tier index: current tier median divided by the Issue 001 base tier median, times 100.
SVCI: 0.45 times the T1 index, plus 0.45 times the T2 index, plus 0.10 times the T3 index.
The weights are not renormalized when coverage changes. If a provider is captured-excluded, it does not enter the median, but it still affects the Coverage Score and Compute Opacity Index through the fixed tier denominator. That is why a loss of comparable public coverage can move the index even when matched-provider prices are unchanged.
Coverage and opacity metrics.
Coverage is tier-weighted. It is not priced providers divided by twenty-seven. The denominators are fixed at T1 4, T2 18, and T3 5. The formula is: 0.45 times T1 included over 4, plus 0.45 times T2 included over 18, plus 0.10 times T3 included over 5.
The Compute Opacity Index is 100 times one minus Coverage. In Issues 001, 002 and 008, ten of eighteen Tier 2 providers and two of five Tier 3 providers cleared the gate, producing Coverage 0.7400 and COI 26.0. In Issues 003, 004, 006 and 007, nine of eighteen Tier 2 providers and two of five Tier 3 providers cleared the gate, producing Coverage 0.7150 and COI 28.5. The sealed Issue 005 record had ten of eighteen Tier 2 providers and two of five Tier 3 providers, producing Coverage 0.7400 and COI 26.0. A simple excluded share, such as 12 out of 27 in Issues 006 and 007, is audit-only and is not the COI.
Secondary readings.
The issue pages publish secondary readings that help readers interpret the market. They are not the SVCI and do not change the headline composite.
- Companion Dollar Basket: 0.45 times the T1 median, plus 0.45 times the T2 median, plus 0.10 times the T3 median. It is the dollar companion to the base-100 index.
- Hyperscaler Premium: T1 median divided by the pooled non-hyperscaler median. In Issues 003 and 004, the pooled non-hyperscaler median equals the T2 median at public precision.
- Neocloud Discount: one minus T2 median divided by T1 median. It states the discount of the Tier 2 median versus the Tier 1 median.
- Price Floor: the median of the lowest K headline observations, where K is the greater of one and ceil(N times 0.25). The calculation uses all headline-included rates across the three tiers. Issue 005 publishes 2.82; Issues 006 and 007 publish 2.97; Issue 009 publishes 3.075. The metric is not used in SVCI, Coverage, or COI.
- Confidence Score: reserved in the original reading set but not published while the per-row confidence audit remains incomplete.
What the Index does not measure.
The Index does not measure private contract pricing. Negotiated rates between named providers and named customers are confidential and often materially different from public list. Hyperscale committed-use customers commonly pay below list, sometimes materially so for multi-year capacity agreements. The Index does not infer those numbers.
The Index does not blend reserved pricing, committed-use pricing, bundled enterprise agreements, spot markets, per-token inference prices, or alternative-silicon pricing into the headline composite. Those markets are covered editorially or in companion work only when their source basis is clear and separately labeled.
Corrections and version control.
A correction changes a published record only when a source, rate, inclusion ruling, derivation, or package artifact is proven wrong. Corrections are public and dated. Clarifications that make formulas more explicit without changing issue outputs are marked as methodology clarifications. Issue 004 v1.2.4, for example, did not change any rate or index value; it only clarified methodology wording and site consistency.
Every issue links to its data layer, calculation report, capture ledger, and evidence manifest where those artifacts are public. The data layer is the source of truth for rows and numeric calculations. The issue page is the public reading layer. The methodology page explains the rules that connect them.
How the publication is funded.
Sorso View takes no affiliate, referral, or transaction fees from the providers it measures. No provider can pay to be included, ranked differently, or reviewed. The publication is funded by readers, data products, research products, licensing, and buyer-side tools. That separation is structural, and it is why the benchmark can be cited.
How to read an issue.
Start with the SVCI level and the change from the prior sealed issue named as the movement basis. Track 2 issues also state which exclusions are carried from the most recent full sweep and when the next full-panel re-verification is due. A sealed interrupted-cycle record may appear in the archive without becoming a comparison baseline. Then read the tier medians to see where the movement came from. Then read Coverage and COI to see how much of the public market resolved to a comparable rate. Finally, read the issue notes, because the movement can come from a price change, a coverage change, a product-surface change, or a panel governance event.
The Index is built to be cited for years. The standard is simple: every number should be defensible on the page, in the data, and in the evidence record behind it.