Renting B300 nodes can make sense while a business is testing demand. Buying GPU hardware and colocating it deserves a closer look when the workload, operating budget and support plan are established. The terms of each offer determine whether those advantages actually apply.
With rental, you pay for access to hardware supplied by a provider. With colocation, you bring your own server and pay a facility to house, power, cool and connect it. If you do not own the server yet, buying it is part of the colocation decision.
Consider a fictional U.S. engineering company testing a private LLM assistant for 90 days. It has not bought a GPU server and does not yet know whether the application will become a permanent service. B300 is the hardware candidate in this example, not a requirement for every private LLM.
What happens if the project stops after 90 days?
Suppose one provider offers a 90-day B300 rental. A colocation proposal has a lower monthly hosting charge, but requires a 12-month facility commitment. The company would also need to purchase the server.
If the experiment ends after 90 days, the company needs to know what it still owes. The rental may have setup, notice or data-export charges. The ownership route leaves it with a server and whatever facility commitments remain. The server may retain value, but its resale price and timing are uncertain.
The useful comparison is the total cost of ending the experiment. A lower monthly hosting charge cannot answer that question on its own. Check the actual minimum term and exit conditions on both proposals before treating either option as flexible.
What is missing from the monthly price?
Both proposals need to account for the work and services required to run the assistant. That includes storage, backups, network traffic, software operation and support. For the ownership route, add the hardware purchase, warranty and any paid physical work at the facility.
One easily missed example is backup traffic. Suppose the company stores 2 TB of data and sends a complete, uncompressed copy every night. Over 30 days, that moves 60 TB of backup data. If an offer includes 10 TB of monthly transfer, ask whether backups use that allowance, a separately billed connection or an included private backup network.
The 60 TB figure is transfer volume, not required backup storage capacity. Keeping only the latest two copies does not reduce the amount copied each night. The backup destination and network path can therefore change the cost comparison.
Recovery responsibilities matter too. Replacing a failed drive and getting the assistant working again are separate jobs. NVIDIA's DGX B300 drive-replacement procedure includes rebuilding storage after the physical replacement. Your proposal should identify who also restores the data and application. NVIDIA DGX B300 service documentation.
Do not assume that renting includes application management, or that colocation leaves every repair to your own team. Ask which responsibilities the particular offer includes.
Ask for two complete cost comparisons
For this company, combine the provider quotes, hardware and support prices, and your own operating-cost estimates to compare two outcomes:
Stop after the evaluation: What has been paid, what remains payable, and what does it cost to export the data and leave after 90 days?
Continue into production: What is the total cost of the 90-day evaluation followed by 12 additional months, including any renewal, support and operating charges?
Use the same intended server configuration, application requirements and support scope in both comparisons. State where documents, prompts, logs and backups must remain, and who may have administrative access. These requirements apply regardless of who owns the hardware.
Also request a committed date for usable access. A shipping estimate, an available rack and a server ready for your application are different stages of the deployment.
The company can then decide whether the flexibility of the actual rental offer is worth its price, or whether the longer commitment of ownership fits its plans. It has a comparison based on what it must pay and operate, rather than two incomplete monthly figures.
Planning a B300 deployment in the United States? Contact Psychz to discuss node access or colocation for your own GPU hardware. The proposal should confirm the configuration, site, availability, service responsibilities and any partner-delivered components.
