[SMM Computing Power Update] Chaos in computing power investment and construction, disputing enterprises undertake full construction

SMM learned from practitioners at well-known cloud platforms that in early 2026, investment mainly went into building data center-grade GPU servers for leasing. Affected by July's GPU price increases, they have turned to subleasing, and new investment has shifted to RTX 5060 and RTX 5070 for cloud gaming. Currently, RTX graphics card prices continue to rise moderately, with brand-new boxed RTX 5060 cards with a three-year warranty quoted at 2,900–2,950 yuan per card. SMM believes that GPU price increases have driven the supply side of computing power leasing toward subleasing, accelerating the penetration of consumer-grade cards into cloud gaming.

SMM learned from cloud platform industry practitioners that demand for domestic server leases of less than one year is difficult to match with market resources, and suppliers generally prefer long-term contracts. Relevant sources suggested that short-term rental buyers may choose private cloud deployments with qualifications for handling classified data. SMM believes that the short-term rental supply-demand mismatch highlights that suppliers mainly lock in capacity through long-term agreements, while flexible short-term rentals remain scarce supply.

Computing power rental prices moved sideways today, with monthly rental and per-card-hour quotes for all models unchanged, mainly because no new resources were released into the market. Meanwhile, DeepSeek announced that it raised V4 series API pricing and introduced differentiated peak/off-peak pricing. Cached input pricing saw significant increases, well beyond the range of cost increases, signaling a pattern of testing the market with higher prices while leaving room for future anchoring. Frontline token businesses face a single pricing source and limited bargaining power, and need to closely monitor token price trends.