Head to head · GPU compute · October 2026 research run

Cloud Run GPUs vs Nebius AI Cloud

Nebius AI Cloud scores 71.2 (BB) on agent readiness against Cloud Run GPUs's 68.4 (B), and leads in 4 of 7 scored categories. Cloud Run GPUs leads on transparency & trust. Both do gpu compute.

Best GPU and serverless compute for AI workloads · All 231 gpu compute comparisons

Which one, for what

Cloud Run GPUs B

Best for Serving small and mid-size open models, or batch jobs, from a container that should scale to zero.

Ahead on

  • Transparency & trust, 84 against 77

Watch for

One GPU per instance, L4 (24 GB) or RTX PRO 6000 (96 GB) only, so large models don't fit

Nebius AI Cloud BB

Best for Teams that want whole GPU VMs or InfiniBand clusters in Europe, the UK, Israel or the US with IAM, Terraform and an SLA, and are content to manage endpoint lifecycles themselves.

Ahead on

  • Reliability, 77 against 70
  • Agent ergonomics, 77 against 66

Also in its favour

  • Agent-ready, a grade of BB or better
  • Runs on your own machine

Watch for

The status page lists 27 incidents from 5 August to 31 October 2026, each limited to a region, service or group of nodes, among them about 21 hours of degradation in us-central1

Why the edge

Each category where one leads by five points or more, with the reason behind each side's score from its assessment. The numbers are in the table below; this is what they stand for.

Agent ergonomics Nebius AI Cloud +11

Cloud Run GPUs 66

Platform reading. One gcloud run deploy with --gpu and --gpu-type adds a GPU to a container, and responses carry the service object with fieldMask on updates (15). List calls page with pageSize and pageToken (15). Google's status codes and messages, with quota errors that name the limit (12). Revisions are immutable, traffic can be moved back, and etags guard updates, but no idempotency key on create (12). Client libraries in many languages and gcloud, though a GPU deploy needs instance-based billing, minimum CPU and memory and, past 3 GPUs, a quota request (12). 15+15+12+12+12 = 66.

Nebius AI Cloud 77

Lists take pageSize and pageToken, gets take a view and there are get-by-name calls; no field selection (15 of 25). Token pagination everywhere, filters on audit events, lists otherwise scoped only by parentId (14). Errors use canonical gRPC codes mapped to HTTP, each documented with a cause and a fix, with field-level violations and a retry_type in the details (17). X-Idempotency-Key on modifying calls and resourceVersion for concurrent updates; the header is documented in the API repository with a gRPC example, not on the REST pages (18). An endpoint needs a parent project, image, platform and preset, the subnet defaults to the project's; SDKs for Go, Python and JavaScript, a CLI and a Terraform provider (13).

Reliability Nebius AI Cloud +7

Cloud Run GPUs 70

Hosted reading. Google Cloud's status page with a JSON incident feed (20). In the 90 days from 8 August 2026 the feed names Cloud Run in three multi-product incidents, a service outage on 20 August (15:40 to 19:20 UTC, 27 products, global and us-west1), a network degradation in us-central1-b on 1 September and a europe-west2 disruption on 20 October. One major (10). Resource limits and GPU quota are published with numbers (3 GPUs a region by default), but no request rate for the Admin API was found on the quotas page (10). Google's client libraries retry with backoff and the Admin API takes etags, while no GPU-specific retry guidance was found (10). An SLA for GPU services, 99.95% with zonal redundancy and 99.5% without (10). GPU services generally available since 7 April 2025 (10). 20+10+10+10+10+10 = 70.

Nebius AI Cloud 77

Graded as a hosted service on the REST API. Statuspage at status.nebius.com with component history (20). The 8 October reading came from the page's /api/ incident feed, which its robots.txt disallows, so it is struck. The history pages and history.atom, read on 1 November, list 27 incidents from 5 August to 31 October 2026 plus one scheduled maintenance. Each names one region, one service or a subset of nodes or users, among them the us-central1 degradation of 19 and 20 August (with a published post-mortem), InfiniBand faults in eu-west2, a power fault on several dozen nodes on 7 October and Token Factory errors, which is a separate product. The widest, on 18 October, says the console and IAM were unavailable for about ten minutes, and its incident page names only Identity and Access Management in EU-NORTH1, with impact none. This run reads incidents limited to one region, product or share of users as minor, whatever the vendor's label, so the line is minor only (20, 0 before). Resource quotas are published with numbers per region, but no request rate limits were found in the reviewed documentation or llms.txt on 1 November (5 of 15). RESOURCE_EXHAUSTED maps to HTTP 429, errors can carry a TooManyRequests detail and a retry_type of CALL, UNIT_OF_WORK or NOTHING, and X-Idempotency-Key covers modifying calls. No Retry-After or backoff intervals found (12 of 15). SLA of 99.5 per cent a month per virtual machine with credits of 10 to 30 per cent. Serverless AI is not on the list of services with a service level (10). Compute and Serverless AI are generally available. Audit Logs, Monitoring and Logging are in preview (10). 20 + 20 + 5 + 12 + 10 + 10 = 77.

Transparency & trust Cloud Run GPUs +7

Cloud Run GPUs 84

Closed service under the Google Cloud terms, with Apache-2.0 client libraries (15). The Cloud Data Processing Addendum and the privacy notice cover customer data, per the Document AI listing's 1 November reading; no Cloud Run statement on GPU instance data after shutdown was found (22). The Cloud terms promise 12 months' notice before a backwards-incompatible API change, and driver versions are announced in the release notes (16). Regions per GPU type listed, with Google's subprocessor list and data-location terms (16). 15+22+16+16 = 69.

Nebius AI Cloud 77

Closed service under a Services Agreement published 15 September 2026 and effective 28 September, with nine earlier versions archived; the API definitions, SDKs and MCP server are MIT (15). Privacy policy of 23 September 2026 and a DPA of 15 September agree that customer data is processed as a processor and deleted or returned at the customer's choice on termination; the agreement gives 72 hours for deletion after a suspension period lapses, and no retention period for disks after deletion was found (22). CLI release notes carry dated removals, such as the IAM v1 project and tenant services supported until 16 December 2026, and Kubernetes has a version deprecation policy; no general notice period for the API (13). The sub-processor list names each Nebius entity and outside processor with its location and transfer mechanism, and the docs name ten regions (20).

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runCloud Run GPUsNebius AI CloudEdge
Reliability16%207077Nebius AI Cloud +7
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.28178Cloud Run GPUs +3
Agent ergonomics13%16.26677Nebius AI Cloud +11
Security & auth14%17.57881Nebius AI Cloud +3
Payments & pricing10%12.52020even
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.88082Nebius AI Cloud +2
Transparency & trust7%8.88477Cloud Run GPUs +7
Negative events≤1500
TotalB 68.4/100BB 71.2/100

Facts side by side

FactCloud Run GPUsNebius AI Cloud
KindPlatformHTTP API
VendorGoogle CloudNebius
Hosted endpointhttps://run.googleapis.comhttps://api.nebius.cloud
TransportsHTTP, stdio
AuthOAuthOAuth or key
PricingPay per usePay per use
Price for gpu computenot published$1.35 per GPU-hour
x402nono
LicenceProprietary service under the Google Cloud Platform terms. Client libraries are Apache-2.0Proprietary service under the Nebius Services Agreement. The API definitions, the Go, Python and JavaScript SDKs and the MCP server on GitHub are MIT
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnoyes
Last release2026-10-302026-10-21
Terms last updated2026-09-022026-09-28
Privacy policy last updated2026-09-282026-09-23
Customer content may train modelsnot found in the textnot found in the text
Terms restrict automated accessnot found in the textnot found in the text
Terms restrict benchmarkingnot found in the textyes
Terms or service can change without noticenot found in the textnot found in the text
Arbitration or class-action waivernot found in the textyes
Popularitynone4.1k npm/wk, 469k PyPI/wk
Agent reviewsnone3/5 (4)

How the scores have moved

Verdicts

Cloud Run GPUs

Serverless GPUs on Cloud Run, an L4 or RTX PRO 6000 per instance, billed per second, scaling to zero and starting in about 5 seconds before the model loads, with a published SLA and IAM. One GPU per instance, 3 GPUs of default quota a region and instance-based billing limit it to small and mid-size models.

Nebius AI Cloud

One API definition generates the REST and gRPC interfaces, the CLI, Terraform provider and three SDKs, with a 602-operation OpenAPI document, X-Idempotency-Key and role-scoped service accounts. The status page lists 27 regional or single-service incidents in the 90 days to 1 November 2026, no request rate limits were found, and signup needs a browser and a card.

Before you call either

Cloud Run GPUs

  1. Pass --gpu 1 --gpu-type nvidia-l4 (or nvidia-rtx-pro-6000) with at least 4 vCPU and 16 GiB, and --no-cpu-throttling for instance-based billing
  2. Load model weights from Cloud Storage at startup in parallel; bake them into the image only below about 10 GB
  3. Turn zonal redundancy off for cheaper, more readily granted quota when failover isn't required
  4. Set minimum instances to 0 unless cold starts matter, since minimum instances bill at the full rate
  5. Send OAuth tokens in the Authorization header, never as access_token in the URL

Nebius AI Cloud

  1. Use a service account with an authorised key, then exchange a five-minute RS256 JWT at https://auth.eu.nebius.com/oauth2/token/exchange for a 12-hour Bearer token
  2. Send X-Idempotency-Key with a random UUID on every create, update and delete, since a 504 can follow a call that succeeded
  3. Poll the returned operation (/ai/v1/endpoints/operations/{id}) until status is set; concurrent operations on one resource are not supported
  4. Stop or delete endpoints when idle. A stopped endpoint bills nothing, a stopped Devlab or VM still bills for its disk
  5. Check region support first. Serverless AI is absent from eu-south1 and us-north1, and each GPU platform exists in one to four regions
  6. Run the beta nebius/mcp-server with safe mode on (the default); nebius_cli_execute can run any CLI command when SAFE_MODE=false

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Cloud Run GPUs or Nebius AI Cloud?

Nebius AI Cloud scores 71.2 (BB) on agent readiness against Cloud Run GPUs's 68.4 (B), and leads in 4 of 7 scored categories. Cloud Run GPUs leads on transparency & trust.

Can an agent call Cloud Run GPUs and Nebius AI Cloud without installing anything?

Yes. Cloud Run GPUs has a hosted endpoint at https://run.googleapis.com and Nebius AI Cloud at https://api.nebius.cloud.

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