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Head to head · GPU compute · October 2026 research run

Crusoe Cloud vs Nebius AI Cloud

Nebius AI Cloud scores 67.2 (B) on agent readiness against Crusoe Cloud's 63.4 (B), and leads in 3 of 7 scored categories. Crusoe Cloud leads on reliability and payments & pricing. Both do gpu compute.

Best GPU and serverless compute for AI workloads · All 167 gpu compute comparisons

Crusoe CloudCrusoe · HTTP API B63.4/100#396 of 950 Nebius AI CloudNebius · HTTP API B67.2/100#259 of 950

Which one, for what

Crusoe Cloud B

Good for Teams that want whole GPU machines or clusters with managed Kubernetes or Slurm in the US, Iceland or Norway, under an SLA, and are content to manage lifecycles themselves.

Ahead on

  • Reliability, 66 against 57
  • Payments & pricing, 30 against 20

Watch for

No idempotency key or safe-retry guidance was found for create and delete calls, which return asynchronous operations to poll.

Nebius AI Cloud B

Good 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

  • Agent ergonomics, 77 against 45
  • Security & auth, 81 against 74
  • Maintenance & community, 82 against 76

Watch for

Status page lists 14 incidents marked major between 14 July and 8 October 2026, including about 21 hours of partial degradation in us-central1 on 19 August

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runCrusoe CloudNebius AI CloudEdge
Reliability16%206657Crusoe Cloud +9
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.27978Crusoe Cloud +1
Agent ergonomics13%16.24577Nebius AI Cloud +32
Security & auth14%17.57481Nebius AI Cloud +7
Payments & pricing10%12.53020Crusoe Cloud +10
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.87682Nebius AI Cloud +6
Transparency & trust7%8.87777even
Negative events≤1500
Total63.4 · B67.2 · B

Facts side by side

FactCrusoe CloudNebius AI Cloud
KindHTTP APIHTTP API
VendorCrusoeNebius
Hosted endpointhttps://api.cloud.crusoe.ai/v1https://api.nebius.cloud
TransportsHTTP, stdioHTTP, stdio
AuthAPI keyOAuth or key
PricingPay per usePay per use
Price for gpu computenot published$1.35 per GPU-hour
x402nono
LicenceProprietary service under the Crusoe Cloud Platform Terms of Service. The Go client and the MCP server package are MIT. The CLI ships as binaries, and no licence file was found in the Terraform provider repositoryProprietary service under the Nebius Services Agreement. The API definitions, the Go, Python and JavaScript SDKs and the MCP server on GitHub are MIT
Tools exposed41none
Read-only variant documentedyesno
llms.txtyesyes
Last release2026-10-082026-10-07
Terms last updatedcouldn't be read2026-09-28
Privacy policy last updatedcouldn't be read2026-09-23
Customer content may train modelscouldn't be readnot found in the text
Terms restrict automated accesscouldn't be readnot found in the text
Terms restrict benchmarkingcouldn't be readyes
Terms or service can change without noticecouldn't be readnot found in the text
Arbitration or class-action waivercouldn't be readyes
Popularity7 npm/wk4.1k npm/wk, 469k PyPI/wk

Verdicts

Crusoe Cloud

The v1 REST API has a published OpenAPI description, Markdown docs, HMAC-signed keys, reader roles and a 90-day audit log, with on-demand GPU prices public. No idempotency keys or control-plane rate limits were found, spot and B200 prices go through sales, and a storage outage in eu-norway1 lasted about four hours on 29 September 2026.

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 14 major incidents between 14 July and 8 October 2026, no request rate limits were found, and signup needs a browser and a card.

Before you call either

Crusoe Cloud

  1. Sign every request. Build the payload from path, sorted query string, verb and X-Crusoe-Timestamp, HMAC-SHA256 it with the base64url-decoded secret, and send Authorization: Bearer 1.0:<access_key_id>:<signature>.
  2. Use https://api.cloud.crusoe.ai/v1. Some docs pages and the MCP server still name api.crusoecloud.com and /v1alpha5.
  3. Creates, updates and deletes return an operation. Poll the matching operations endpoint for state, and list existing resources by name before retrying a create, because no idempotency key was found.
  4. Managed AI uses separate Intelligence API keys and hosts, api.inference.crusoecloud.com for OpenAI-compatible calls and api.intelligence.crusoecloud.com for files and fine-tuning jobs.
  5. Delete a VM and its disks to stop charges. A stopped on-demand VM is not billed for compute, but its 128 GB OS disk still bills at $0.08 a GiB-month.

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, Crusoe Cloud or Nebius AI Cloud?

Nebius AI Cloud scores 67.2 (B) on agent readiness against Crusoe Cloud's 63.4 (B), and leads in 3 of 7 scored categories. Crusoe Cloud leads on reliability and payments & pricing.

Do Crusoe Cloud and Nebius AI Cloud need an API key?

Crusoe Cloud needs an API key. Nebius AI Cloud takes an API key or an OAuth sign-in.

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

Yes. Crusoe Cloud has a hosted endpoint at https://api.cloud.crusoe.ai/v1 and Nebius AI Cloud at https://api.nebius.cloud.

Other comparisons with Crusoe Cloud or Nebius AI Cloud

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