Yes, but it depends on what you signed.
If you’re about to sign a multi-year GPU reservation, ask one question before you ask about price: if my plans change, can I get out? Most buyers assume no. They treat the reservation as a sunk cost the moment the ink dries. That’s not how the market works in 2026. Reserved capacity, offtake, and prepaid compute can be resold or assigned. Whether you can do it, on what terms, at what cost, is something you negotiate up front.
Reserved, on-demand, and spot are three different products
A GPU price isn’t one number. It depends on what you’re buying.
- On-demand is pay-by-the-second, no commitment. Modal’s public pricing page, checked August 2026, lists on-demand serverless rates of $7.10/hr for B300 and $3.95/hr for H100 SXM5. Lambda’s public pricing page, also checked August 2026, lists on-demand H100 SXM at $3.99 to $4.29/hr depending on cluster size.
- Reserved is a forward commitment, usually one to three years, cheaper per hour because you committed. Compute Exchange’s public reserved-GPU pricing page, published April 10, 2026, states that a one-year reserved H100 SXM contract runs near $1.89/hr and a three-year reserved H100 PCIe contract near $1.84/hr, against an on-demand H100 SXM rate of about $2.99/hr quoted on the same page.
- Spot is unreserved, interruptible capacity priced off whatever happens to be idle. It can be cheaper than both, or briefly more expensive, depending on demand that minute.
A reservation is a forward contract. You agree today to a price and a quantity of compute delivered later, and you get a discount off on-demand for it.
Put $1.89/hr reserved (Compute Exchange, April 10, 2026) next to $3.95/hr on-demand (Modal, August 2026) and the reservation looks like an easy win, roughly 2.1 times cheaper. But a forward contract only pays off if you actually use what you locked in, or can sell it to someone who will.
That second part is the one buyers skip.
The secondary and offtake market already exists
The market already has an answer to “what if I overcommitted.” Here’s one public example, based only on what the company says about itself.
Compute Exchange runs a public marketplace for reserved and secondary GPU hardware. Its blog post on reserved GPU marketplaces, published March 4, 2026, describes more secondary-market activity as expiring A100 and H100 contracts come back on the market. It puts refurbished 2-year-old H100 units at roughly 30 to 40 percent of their historical peak price.
The same post says this resale activity had not, as of its March 2026 publish date, brought prices down the way a buyer might hope. It describes H100 pricing as having risen a further 15 to 20 percent over the period it covers, with several neocloud providers announcing more increases.
Two takeaways. First, reselling and reassigning reserved capacity is a real product category that people market publicly, not a theory. Compute Exchange runs an open marketplace for exactly this.
Second, a secondary market existing doesn’t mean it will bail you out at a good price. If sellers outnumber buyers, or the seller is desperate, the price shows it.
Getting out is a term you negotiate, not a fallback
A secondary market existing doesn’t mean your contract lets you use it. Whether you can resell, assign, or downsize, and whether the provider can block or charge for that transfer, is written into what you sign. It’s much easier to negotiate before than to discover after.
Here’s what no exit clause costs on a generic, round-number commitment. Say a buyer is 18 months into a 3-year reservation on 1,000 GPUs. No right to resell or assign. The workload that justified it is gone.
The remaining exposure is 1,000 GPUs times 8,760 hours per year times 1.5 years:
1,000 x 8,760 x 1.5 = 13,140,000 GPU-hours still owed.
At the low end of Compute Exchange’s April 10, 2026 reserved-H100 range ($1.07/hr), that’s 13,140,000 x $1.07 = about $14.1M still owed under the contract. At the one-year reserved rate on the same page ($1.89/hr), it’s 13,140,000 x $1.89 = about $24.8M.
That’s the size of what an exit clause protects you from on a 1,000-GPU commitment. It’s why “can I get out of this” belongs in the term sheet, not in a follow-up email eighteen months later.
You’re long compute, and that has basis risk
When you sign a multi-year reservation, you’re long compute at a fixed price. It’s the same as a company locking in a forward price on oil or wheat.
The risk isn’t that compute stops being useful. The risk is that the market price moves against you while you’re stuck holding the contract and can’t get out anywhere near the new price. The gap between your locked price and today’s market price is basis risk. A resale or assignment right is how you close it.
This isn’t hypothetical. It already happened with GPUs. Introl’s analysis of the H100 rental market, published January 12, 2026, describes H100 prices falling from an earlier peak of about $8 per hour to a more recent range of $2.85 to $3.50 per hour, a decline it puts at roughly 64 percent. Introl dates that peak to late 2024.
Anyone who locked in a multi-year rate near that peak with no resale right was left holding a contract near $8 an hour, while the market Introl describes repriced to less than half of that.
Same arithmetic as before, same 1,000-GPU commitment with 18 months left. The gap is $8.00/hr minus about $3.18/hr (the midpoint of the $2.85 to $3.50 range Introl cites), which is $4.82/hr.
13,140,000 x $4.82 = about $63.3M between what the stuck buyer pays and what the same capacity costs at the more recent range Introl describes.
Is that real cash lost? Only if the contract gives you a way out: an exit into the cheaper market, a resale to someone else, or a renegotiation. Without one of those three, it’s a paper loss you can’t do anything about, and a bill you still have to pay.
What to ask before you sign
You don’t need to be a GPU engineer for this. You need to ask the questions that turn an assumed sunk cost back into something you control:
- Can this reservation be resold or assigned to another party, and does the counterparty’s consent get unreasonably withheld, or does it come with a fee or a haircut on the price?
- Is there a public or private secondary market for this specific type of contract right now, and what is it currently pricing similar capacity at?
- What happens to the remaining term if your usage drops to zero? Is there a minimum-commitment floor, a downsizing right, or a hard obligation to pay for the full remaining calendar hours regardless of use?
- If the market price for this class of GPU falls after you sign, as it has before, does your contract let you benefit from that in any way, or are you locked at the signing-day rate for the full term?
- Who is on the other side of the resale market if you need to use it, a broker’s aggregated marketplace, or a bilateral deal you would have to originate yourself under time pressure?
A reservation priced well on day one and a reservation you can actually exit are two different things. Only one shows up in the headline rate. Ask about the second before you sign the first.