Google Cloud GPU VMs Alternatives for Inference
Serving or batch-running a model for generation, where throughput per dollar decides the bill.
What inference actually needs
Why people look past Google Cloud GPU VMs for this
Little state to carry, so this is the job that moves most freely on price. The cost is the weight pull and the warm-up on the new box, not lost work. That is exactly the gap Google Cloud GPU VMs does not close: Google Cloud's GPU VMs are the right choice when the rest of your stack is on GCP: BigQuery, GCS and Vertex adjacency are the product. As a standalone GPU rental it is priced as enterprise cloud, and the environment is a GCP disk image that stays in GCP.
To be fair, Google Cloud GPU VMs's real strength is real: Adjacency to BigQuery, GCS, Vertex AI and the rest of the platform, plus enterprise compliance and support.
Live rates for the GPUs inference wants
Live per-GPU rates from Aquanode's marketplace. Refreshes hourly.
How you run it here today
Run it today with the seeded vllm-batch job recipe — a real, publicly-imaged container Aquanode can queue directly, not a template we're promising to build later.
Restoring an environment requires a snapshot that already exists. Stopping a deployment yourself captures it on the way out, so you can bring it back later on any provider. A provider-side termination is different: it is only recoverable if you had already switched automated snapshots on for that deployment, and it costs you the work since the last one. Automated snapshots are opt-in, nothing runs until you start it, and with none running there is nothing to restore.
More alternatives pages
Other workloads on Google Cloud GPU VMs
Inference alternatives to other clouds
