Azure GPU VMs vs Aquanode

Hyperscaler GPU VMs (NC, ND series) inside Microsoft Azure

Azure's NC and ND series make sense when your organisation is already on Azure and the GPU needs to sit inside that boundary. Priced and operated as enterprise cloud; the environment is an Azure managed disk and does not leave Azure.

Where Azure GPU VMs wins

Enterprise integration — Entra ID, Azure networking, compliance certifications, and existing enterprise agreements.
Azure Machine Learning as a managed layer above the VMs.
Reserved instances and enterprise discounting at commitment scale.

Where Aquanode wins

Your environment survives the box. Pause a deployment, come back tomorrow, resume with packages, model weights and config intact — instead of rebuilding from a fresh image every session.
A snapshot taken on one provider restores onto another. Supply moved, price moved, or a region ran dry — the environment follows, rather than being stranded in the account that created it.
One account across every provider we broker, so you are not maintaining separate logins, keys and billing per vendor to chase capacity.
Automated backups are on by default when you attach storage at deploy time, at a 6-hour interval — you do not have to remember to configure them.

Azure GPU VMs pricing

We could not verify a Azure GPU VMs price first-party, so this page publishes none. Azure publishes VM rates through an interactive, region- and currency-parameterised pricing tool; the pricing page we fetched on 2026-08-05 rendered no static hourly figures. We link Microsoft's own page rather than quote a number we cannot cite first-party.

Checked https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/machine-learning/ on 2026-08-05.

What we do not claim

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.

`aq deploy --snapshot <id>` rents the cheapest matching GPU and restores your snapshot onto it — including onto a different provider than the one it came from. Creating the snapshot is a separate step today: the standalone ogre CLI on the box writes it.