CoreWeave vs Lambda Cloud

CoreWeave

Per-hour prices for 8-GPU H100, H200 and B200 nodes are public, the docs ship as Markdown with llms.txt and embedded OpenAPI specs, and IAM has read-only roles per service. An organisation must be approved by CoreWeave's sales team before any token exists, and no request rate limits were found in the reviewed documentation.

Lambda Cloud

H100 SXM at $3.99 and B200 at $6.69 an hour with per-minute billing. No scale to zero, autoscaling or endpoints; an idle VM bills until terminated.

CoreWeave

1. Create an API access token at console.coreweave.com/tokens with an expiry and send it as Authorization: Bearer to https://api.coreweave.com
2. Add GPUs by applying a NodePool resource (compute.coreweave.com/v1alpha1) to a CKS cluster with instanceType and targetNodes. instanceType can't be changed afterwards
3. Set targetNodes to 0 or delete the Node Pool when a job ends. Nodes are whole 8-GPU machines billed by the hour
4. Never pass dry_run to the MCP tool coreweave_kubectl_apply expecting a preview. The reference says the parameter is ignored and the manifest is applied
5. Use a separate Forge API key and https://api.inference.wandb.ai/v1 for Serverless Inference. A CoreWeave API access token doesn't work there

Lambda Cloud

1. Call GET /instance-types first and read regions_with_capacity_available before trying to launch
2. Space launch calls 12 seconds apart; a sixth in a minute returns 429 with global/rate-limited
3. Branch on the error code, not the message or suggestion, which Lambda says may change
4. List instances before retrying a failed launch, since there's no idempotency key and a retry can start a second machine
5. Terminate the instance in a finally block; billing runs by the minute until you do