Google Cloud GPU VMs vs Aquanode
Hyperscaler GPU VMs (A3/A2) inside Google Cloud
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.
Where Google Cloud GPU VMs wins
- Adjacency to BigQuery, GCS, Vertex AI and the rest of the platform, plus enterprise compliance and support.
- Committed-use discounts and sustained-use pricing that meaningfully reduce the rate at volume.
- TPUs, if your workload targets them — nobody else has that option.
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.
Google Cloud GPU VMs pricing
We could not verify a Google Cloud GPU VMs price first-party, so this page publishes none. Google Cloud's GPU rates are region-dependent and served through its pricing calculator; the static pricing pages we fetched on 2026-08-05 did not render a readable per-GPU hourly table. Rather than quote a figure from a third-party aggregator, we link Google's own page — check it for your region.
Checked https://cloud.google.com/compute/gpus-pricing 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.
Google Cloud GPU VMs vs Aquanode: common questions
Why no Google Cloud prices in the table?
Their GPU rates vary by region and are published through an interactive calculator rather than a static table we can cite and date. We only publish competitor prices we have read off the vendor's own page, so this one is flagged rather than guessed.
