Nebius AI Cloud vs Runpod

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.

Runpod

Per-second billing across more than a dozen serverless GPU classes, H100 at $4.79 and A100 80 GB at $2.72 an hour. Data-centre outages of 6 to 24 hours in each of July, August and September 2026.

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

Runpod

1. Create a Restricted or Read Only key per endpoint for the agent, not an All key
2. Use REST v2 at api.runpod.io/v2 with a Bearer header; avoid GraphQL, which puts the key in the URL
3. Fetch /run results within 30 minutes and /runsync results within 1 minute, or they're gone
4. Call /retry on a failed job ID rather than submitting a duplicate job
5. Check /health before relying on an endpoint idle for a week, since max workers drop to 0