Nvidia steps back from DGX Cloud — stops trying to compete with AWS and Azure

Nvidia's DGX Cloud, once positioned as a direct-to-enterprise AI cloud, has quietly taken a backseat in the company's external strategy. According to an insider speaking to The Information, the GPU behemoth now uses most of DGX Cloud's capacity for internal research rather than promoting it as a customer-facing product.

It's a subtle change, but in Nvidia's financial results for the second quarter of its 2026 financial year, the company no longer attributes its multibillion-dollar cloud spend commitments to DGX Cloud, a disclosure it had included in prior quarters. This service is still listed in revenue categories, but its role has clearly shifted to in-house infrastructure. In other words, DGX is still alive and kicking, but it's no longer meant to compete head-on with the likes of Microsoft Azure or AWS.

DGX Cloud launched in 2023 with a premium price tag of $36,999 per H100 instance per month. That price made sense amid shortages of the time, but less so today. AWS has slashed H100 and A100 prices by as much as 45%, undercutting Nvidia's direct service and making hyperscaler rentals the obvious choice for most customers. With availability improving, DGX Cloud's role as a scarcity workaround effectively evaporated.

Instead, Nvidia has turned its focus to Lepton, a GPU rental marketplace launched earlier this year. Unlike DGX Cloud — which involved Nvidia renting GPUs from neocloud players like CoreWeave and then subleasing them to customers — Lepton acts as a traffic controller. It routes workloads to partner providers, including AWS and Azure, which are set to join the marketplace despite their own GPU offerings. This makes Nvidia less of a rival and more of an aggregator in the cloud AI economy.

What Nvidia gains in return is leverage. By positioning Lepton as a GPU marketplace, it keeps smaller providers plugged into its ecosystem. Ultimately, the company doesn't need to own the cloud. It just needs to own the stack and the demand funnel tied to it. Even if customers never touch DGX Cloud, they're still paying Nvidia.

For developers, the shift from DGX Cloud to Lepton means more accessible GPU capacity at competitive prices through the clouds they already use. For Nvidia, meanwhile, it means less channel conflict and a tighter grip on the flow of GPU workloads worldwide.

Follow Tom's Hardware on Google News to get our up-to-date news, analysis, and reviews in your feeds. Make sure to click the Follow button.