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← Advanced money · Mission 2 of 10

Rent out your GPU to AI developers while you sleep

AI developers all over the world rent other people's graphics cards by the hour, and Vast.ai is the biggest open marketplace for it. Do the real maths first, with UK electricity and a calculator that tells you if your card will pay. Then build the host: Ubuntu Server, the NVIDIA driver, Vast's software, and the settings that decide whether you get rented.

210 minAdvancedTools: Free if you already own a suitable PC. A new single-GPU host build is around £1,300 to £2,900Step 1 free
A yes or no before you spenda calculator for profit after UK electricity, break-even utilisation and your minimum bid
A dedicated Ubuntu Server GPU host that passes a read-only preflight against Vast.ai's verification rules
Your machine listed on Vast.ai with sensible on-demand, interruptible, disk and duration settings
  • The habits that keep reliability above 90%: maintenance windows, alerts, a UPS and no surprise reboots
  • A kit: profit calculator (Python and spreadsheet), preflight script, parts list and a weekly hosting log
Before you start
  • An NVIDIA GPU with more than 7GB of VRAM (Maxwell or newer). The ones that rent best are 24GB and up: RTX 3090, 4090, 5090
  • Wired broadband with 500Mbps upload and download, and a public IPv4 address (not CGNAT)
  • A spare SSD of 200GB or more for renters' containers, and a machine you won't use for anything else
  • Comfortable installing Linux and using SSH. New to it? Start with Terminal survival kit
  • Curious what renters do on the other side? See Rent a cloud GPU
01/08Find out if your GPU will pay before you plug anything in0 done
STEP 01 of 08~20 min

Find out if your GPU will pay before you plug anything in

Run the numbers with your card, your tariff and real market prices, so you build the version that pays.

  1. How the money worksOn Vast.ai you set a price per GPU hour and renters pay by the second while they use it. Vast says it plainly: the rate you set is the rate you receive, with no commission taken from your earnings; Vast adds its own margin on the renter's side (vast.ai/hosting ↗). Payouts go out weekly through Wise, PayPal or Stripe once you've built up $20 (payout docs ↗).

  2. What sells is VRAMRenters pick by memory first, because that decides which models fit. A 24GB card (RTX 3090, 4090) or a 32GB card (RTX 5090) is the floor for most AI work. To see what renters actually pay for each card, check the GPU grid at vast.ai/pricing ↗ or the price table in Rent a cloud GPU. Your host price has to sit below what renters see.

  3. The cost that decides it is electricityA rented RTX 5090 machine pulls around 700W at the wall, all day. At the Ofgem price cap average of 26.32p per kWh (Direct Debit, check the current cap ↗) that's about 18p an hour just in power. Download gpu_pays.py (standard library only) and run it:

    The RTX 5090 example (new build, £2,900)
    python gpu_pays.py
    Output
    Host price $0.45/hr  load 700W  idle 80W  power £0.2632/kWh  hardware £2,900 over 36 months

 rented    income    kWh    power  after power  after hardware
   25%       £62    172      £45          £17            -£64
   50%      £124    285      £75          £49            -£31
   70%      £174    375      £99          £75             -£5
   90%      £224    466     £123         £101             £20

Power cost of one busy hour: $0.244. Set your interruptible minimum bid near this.
Break-even after hardware: rented 75% of the time at this price.

  4. Pick the winning setupA brand-new £2,900 rig on a domestic tariff needs to be rented about three quarters of the month, so treat that as the expansion move, not the starting point. The strongest start is a card you already own, say an RTX 4090 that sits idle most of the day. With no hardware to pay off, it's in profit from the first rented hour:

    A 4090 you already own
    python gpu_pays.py --price 0.30 --load-w 550 --idle-w 70 --hardware 0
    Output
     rented    income    kWh    power  after power  after hardware
   25%       £41    139      £37           £5              £5
   50%       £83    226      £60          £23             £23
   70%      £116    296      £78          £38             £38
   90%      £149    366      £96          £53             £53

Power cost of one busy hour: $0.191. Set your interruptible minimum bid near this.
Break-even after hardware: rented 19% of the time at this price.

  5. And the same new 5090 rig on cheaper power, for example a business tariff or a large solar array (--unit-rate 0.15), breaks even at 50% rented instead of 75%. Power price is the biggest lever you have.

    Careful
    • What it takes. Hardware: an NVIDIA card with 24GB+ VRAM to compete, in a machine you'll dedicate to hosting (personal use fails verification).
    • Internet: 500Mbps upload and download on a wired connection with a public IPv4 address.
    • Power: your tariff decides the profit; run the calculator with your real unit rate.
    • Hours: an afternoon to build and install, then a few minutes a week, plus fixing problems quickly when they happen.
    • Time to first rental: depends on your card, price and verification; popular cards priced at or below the market go fastest.
    • Who this suits: someone who already owns a high-VRAM card or has cheap power, likes running Linux, and wants hardware to pay its own way.

  6. Everything's in the kitDownload the kit: the calculator (Python and spreadsheet), the preflight script, a parts list and a weekly log.

✓
CheckpointYou've run gpu_pays.py with your own card's watts, your own tariff and a realistic price, and you know your break-even utilisation.
If it breaksHow do I know my real watts? + 1 more
How do I know my real watts?
Plug the PC into a plug-in energy meter, run a GPU stress test or a long AI job for 10 minutes, and read the number. Then read it again idle. Use those two numbers with --load-w and --idle-w.
The £ sign prints as a strange character on Windows
That's the terminal's encoding, not the maths. Run $env:PYTHONIOENCODING="utf-8" in PowerShell first, or open the spreadsheet version instead.
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