GPU prices are rising again, and AI development is difficult to slow down proactively.

1/ Youjin Investment Securities analysis points out that GPU rental prices continue to rise and competition among AI models is intensifying, so the investment attractiveness of the AI hardware value chain remains high. 2/ NBIS has decided to raise on-demand GPU rental prices by up to 21% starting from October 1. This is another price increase following a 30% price hike across the entire product line in June; the rental price of B300 has increased by 56% in approximately five months. 3/ Oracle has also stated that it has renewed or resold GPUs whose contracts have expired at prices 20% higher than before. The increase in rental prices is reflected in both spot and contract prices and is expected to drive the performance growth of new cloud service providers. 4/ Competition among AI models is also accelerating. According to reports, Anthropic is considering launching a new model prior to its IPO to compete with OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra. 5/ Elon Musk mentioned that pretraining of Grok 4.8, which has 2.5 trillion parameters, has been completed. Sam Altman has announced that several new products will be released around DevDay on September 29. 6/ In such a competitive environment, actively slowing down AI development is actually very difficult. Despite macro risks, infrastructure investment is expected to remain strong.