Morning Brief: Wednesday, July 1, 2026

Today's lesson

What is High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM)?

High-bandwidth memory is fast memory located near advanced accelerators to keep AI workloads supplied with data. Why it matters today: Today's lesson connects the Power & Data Centers track to the compute market readers are watching.

Term of the Day

Power usage effectiveness

Power usage effectiveness, or PUE, compares total facility power to the power used by IT equipment. A lower PUE means less extra power is being spent on cooling, lighting, and other overhead. AI data centers care about PUE because GPU clusters already consume large amounts of electricity.

H100 IndexiWhat it costs to rent one H100 GPU for an hour on demand — the market’s anchor price.

Value

$6.52 / H100-hr

Last Price Change

Jul 29, 2026

Spot Compute PriceiThe cheaper, interruptible GPU price — a read on whether spare capacity is available.

Value

$2.46 / H100e-hourH100e-hour means an H100-equivalent GPU hour, a normalized unit used to compare different GPUs and providers.

Last Price Change

May 27, 2026

Model Serving CostiRoughly what it costs to run a model and generate its output at scale, per million tokens.

Value

$2.78 / 1M tokens

Last Price Change

Jun 22, 2026

GPU AvailabilityiHow easy or hard it is to actually get GPU capacity right now, scored 0–100.

Value

78 / 100 score

Last change

May 27, 2026

Jun 30, 2026

PJM Capacity Auction for 2028/2029 Delivery Year Opens

this may affect capacity expansion supply, demand, capacity, bottlenecks, or financing.

Jun 30, 2026

How NVIDIA’s Inference Software Stack Powers the Lowest Token Cost

this may affect power supply, demand, capacity, bottlenecks, or financing.

Jun 30, 2026

Digital Realty acquires Blackstone's stake in three Virginia data centers for $3.5 billion

Watch item for AI compute supply, demand, capacity, infrastructure, or market structure.

Jun 30, 2026

Virtus to develop 32.5MW data center in Slough, UK

Watch item for AI compute supply, demand, capacity, infrastructure, or market structure.

Jun 30, 2026

Claude in Microsoft Foundry is now generally available

this may affect capacity expansion supply, demand, capacity, bottlenecks, or financing.

H100 GPU Pricing Report: July 2026

Canonical CT-H100 median, reviewed H100 provider rows, freshness dates, and composition caveats in one citable report.

Previous issue: Morning Brief: Tuesday, June 30, 2026

Signal window: Monday, June 29, 2026. Claude Meets Blackwell Ultra: Anthropic’s Models Now Run on NVIDIA GB300 in Azure

Next issue: Morning Brief: Thursday, July 2, 2026

Signal window: Wednesday, July 1, 2026. Egypt greenlights license for $400m data center expansion