[SMM Hashrate Express] Subleasing of Hashrate Rentals Is Widespread; New Entrants Shift Toward Existing Resources

The lowest hourly rate for 4090 cards in the Pearl River Delta fell to 1.27 yuan (down 2.31%), and the lowest monthly rental was revised down to 7,300 yuan. After removing the 300-yuan intermediary fee from Shenzhen data center quotes, the true rental price was restored; other prices remained stable. The 4090 was mainly used for on-premises enterprise inference, and as workstation-class substitutes such as NVIDIA DGX Spark diverted demand, slightly lower prices may become the norm.

SMM learned that a large number of 5090 servers have recently entered the market, with multiple channels promoting them simultaneously, and the quoted monthly rental rate per unit is about 12,000–14,000 yuan. Some channel sources reported that this kind of concentrated promotion is similar to the previous 4090 market situation, and it is suspected that the same supply is being quoted repeatedly under different descriptions. SMM also learned that in the previous 4090 Ningbo data center case, the same batch of supply was marked up at each layer after passing through multiple intermediaries; if the current large-scale entry of 5090s is indeed the same supply being quoted separately on the supply side, it will disrupt the market pricing system. Buyers are advised to verify the uniqueness of the supply when comparing prices and to be alert to inflated prices caused by repeated quotations.

SMM learned that a data center in South China released 32 RTX 5090 eight-GPU servers, with PCIe 5.0 specifications, at a monthly rental of 13,200 yuan per unit, available for monthly rentals with an open-ended contract. An open-ended contract means the price follows the market and is not locked, as opposed to a closed, price-locked contract. SMM believes that offering the 5090 model for monthly rental under an open-ended contract reflects the supply side’s tendency to retain pricing flexibility amid fluctuations in consumer-grade GPU prices.