Investors now gate your next round on gross margins your inference bill is destroying. The firms that negotiate compute contracts won't take your call below $1M. Your CFO firm can model the problem — but never sits across the table. Ferrous does both: we renegotiate the contracts, then build the unit-economics story your raise depends on. Buyer-side only. Seed to Series C.
The 2026 fundraising benchmarks are explicit: Series A investors now cite 60%+ gross margins as the bar, while the average AI product builder runs 52% — with inference alone averaging roughly 23% of revenue. Your compute contracts are no longer an infrastructure detail. They are the difference between a fundable margin story and a pass.
Now look at who could help. The firms that negotiate compute contracts for a living serve the enterprise: the leading cloud cost consultancy brands itself for companies "spending $100M/yr+" and its clients average $70M a year in cloud spend. Enterprise IT sourcing advisors start at seven-figure deals. Your fractional CFO firm builds excellent models of the problem — but has never sat across the table from AWS, CoreWeave, or Anthropic. And your dashboards just show you the bill.
| Provider | H100 /GPU-hr | Type |
|---|---|---|
| AWS P5 | $6.88 | Hyperscaler |
| Azure NC H100 v5 | $6.98 | Hyperscaler |
| GCP A3 High | ~$3.00 | Hyperscaler |
| Lambda Labs | $3.29–3.99 | Neocloud |
| Spheron | $2.54 | Neocloud |
| RunPod community | $1.99–2.39 | Neocloud |
| Thunder Compute | $1.38 | Neocloud |
| AWS savings plan | $1.90–2.10 | Reserved |
Representative on-demand rates as published May–July 2026 · Spheron · IntuitionLabs · Cast AI · ThunderCompute · Lambda. Actual pricing varies by region, configuration, and pricing model (on-demand vs capacity blocks vs reserved) — which is exactly why benchmarking your specific contract matters.
The advisory we provide today delivers immediate, measurable value without requiring any financial market to exist. The renegotiated contracts, the recovered margin, the funded rounds — none of this depends on regulatory approval or market liquidity.
The longer-term direction is clear: compute is becoming a financial asset class. CME, ICE, and AX have all announced compute futures products. Silicon Data — DRW-backed and CME-partnered — has launched the GPU Forward Curve: the first standardised 12-month view of anticipated GPU rental costs, giving Ferrous and its clients the most credible daily benchmark currently available. When those instruments arrive, the companies that trusted Ferrous with their contracts will be first to benefit from the hedging phase.
Send your top three AI or compute contracts — or the renewal sitting in your inbox. In the first conversation we'll benchmark them live against verified market rates and tell you what they should cost and what leverage you hold. You leave with numbers, not a proposal deck. No commitment.