Cloud negotiation firms won't take your call below enterprise scale — and none of them touch your OpenAI, Anthropic, or Bedrock commits at all. Your CFO firm models the margin problem but never sits across the table. Ferrous negotiates the AI contracts your margin story depends on, then builds the unit-economics narrative your raise requires. Buyer-side only. Seed to Series C.
Send one contract or invoice. Get a two-page benchmark memo in 48 hours. Free. No call required.
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 — honestly. Cloud cost consultancies exist, but the leading ones brand themselves for companies spending $100M+/yr, and even the ones without a stated floor negotiate the AWS bill and stop there. Commitment-automation tools optimize reservations inside one cloud. 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.
None of them — not one — negotiates the contract that is actually eating your margin: the model API commit. Your OpenAI, Anthropic, and Bedrock agreements are the fastest-growing line on your P&L and the least-negotiated contracts in your company.
| Provider | H100 /GPU-hr | Type |
|---|---|---|
| Azure NC H100 v5 | $6.98 | Hyperscaler |
| AWS P5 | $6.88 | 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.
You're the one citing the gross-margin benchmark in partner meetings — and the one watching portfolio companies miss it because of contracts nobody at the company has ever negotiated. Every point of inference cost recovered is a point of gross margin at the next round, and a cleaner markup for your fund.
Ferrous runs a portfolio compute screen: a benchmark memo on the top compute contracts across your Seed-to-C AI companies, delivered to you and each founder. You see which margin stories are at risk before diligence finds them. Founders get the numbers and the leverage. No cost to the fund.
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.
But the longer-term direction is clear: CME, ICE, and AX have all announced compute futures products, and Silicon Data's GPU Forward Curve now offers a standardised 12-month view of anticipated GPU rental costs. When hedging instruments arrive for compute, the firms holding the best transaction-level comps will price them best — and the companies whose contracts built those comps will be first to benefit.
One AI or compute contract, renewal quote, or invoice — that's all the free benchmark needs. Two pages back within 48 hours: what you pay vs. market, your leverage points, and the number to ask for. Yours to keep. No call, no proposal deck, no commitment.