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8× H200 PCIe inference cluster — quote to live in 9 days

A Series B AI company was spending $180K/month on cloud GPU instances. Haink supplied a configured NVIDIA H200 PCIe node cluster that broke even in under 14 months — and outperformed the cloud baseline by 3×.

9 daysQuote to powered-on cluster
8× H200PCIe 96 GB HBM3e per GPU
Inference throughput vs prior cloud
14 moCloud break-even payback

The situation

The problem

Cloud costs scaling faster than revenue

The team ran LLM inference on cloud GPU instances. At Series B scale — 40M+ daily API calls — the monthly GPU bill hit $180K and was growing. Reserved instances required 12-month commitments with no hardware flexibility. The CTO wanted to understand the own-vs-rent math before the next funding round.

What we supplied

8-GPU H200 PCIe server, configured and tested

Haink proposed a 2U server with 8× NVIDIA H200 PCIe 96 GB GPUs, dual Xeon Platinum CPUs, 1.5 TB DDR5 ECC RAM, 4× 7.68 TB NVMe, and dual 100 GbE NICs. We handled pre-racking, firmware baseline, and burn-in testing before shipping. The client racked, cabled, and had the first model loaded in an afternoon.

Delivery timeline

Every step from first contact to first inference token.

1
Day 1 Technical scoping call Reviewed inference workload: model sizes (7B–70B), batch latency targets, power envelope. Confirmed H200 PCIe over SXM5 — no NVLink required for the batch sizes in scope, lower chassis cost.
2
Day 2 Firm quote issued — $0 deposit to hold stock GPU availability confirmed from Hong Kong stock. Quoted 8× H200 PCIe server fully configured, 12-month warranty, delivered lead time 7 business days.
3
Day 3 PO received — configuration begins Server chassis pulled from stock. GPUs seated, firmware updated to latest stable release. BIOS tuned for maximum PCIe bandwidth (PCIe Gen5 x16 per slot).
5
Day 5 Burn-in and benchmarking 72-hour GPU stress test (nvidia-smi dmon throughout). Ran vLLM benchmark suite against Llama-3-70B: 4,200 tokens/sec aggregate across 8 GPUs. Results shared with client before shipping.
6
Day 6 Air freight dispatched, Hong Kong → client DC Packed in anti-static foam, flight-crated. Tracking number and customs docs provided same day.
9
Day 9 — Live First production inference token served Client racked and cabled in 90 minutes. CUDA drivers, vLLM, and model weights loaded by afternoon. First production API call served 9 days after initial contact.

Full bill of materials

ComponentSpecificationQty
GPUNVIDIA H200 PCIe 96 GB HBM3e8
Host server2U, dual Intel Xeon Platinum 8592+, 60-core1
System RAMDDR5-5600 ECC RDIMM, 1.5 TB (24× 64 GB)1 set
NVMe storage7.68 TB PCIe Gen5 NVMe (model weights cache)4
NetworkingDual-port 100 GbE QSFP28 NIC1
PowerDual 3 kW redundant PSU, 80+ Titanium2
Warranty12-month return-to-base, parts and labour

H200 PCIe GPUs sourced from Hong Kong stock. Serial numbers verified and provided prior to payment.

Related resources

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Running inference on cloud GPU?

Send your monthly GPU spend and model sizes — Haink will model the own-vs-rent break-even for your workload within one business day.

sales@haink.org