Lambda Cloud vs Nebius AI Cloud

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.

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.

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

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