# How does Zilliz Cloud reduce infrastructure costs compared to self-hosted Blackwell?

Source: https://zilliz.com/ai-faq/how-does-zilliz-cloud-reduce-infrastructure-costs-compared-to-selfhosted-blackwell
Author: zilliz

Zilliz Cloud's managed platform eliminates data center costs, hardware procurement, and ops overhead—delivering better value than self-hosted Blackwell for most organizations.

## No Hardware Capex

Self-hosted Blackwell requires upfront GPU purchases ($50K-500K depending on cluster size). Zilliz Cloud spreads cost across customers via OpEx model. Pay-as-you-go pricing with no capital expenditure.

## Infrastructure and Ops Overhead

Self-hosted clusters require full-time engineers for monitoring, patching, scaling, and failover. Zilliz Cloud handles all ops. Your team focuses on applications instead of infrastructure. Typical ops team (2-3 engineers) can disappear for vector search workloads.

## Utilization Efficiency

Self-hosted clusters over-provision for peak load, wasting capacity during off-peak hours. Zilliz Cloud bins customers across shared infrastructure, improving utilization. Idle GPU hours disappear; costs drop proportionally.

## Multi-Tenancy Economics

Zilliz Cloud packs many customers per Blackwell cluster. Shared hardware costs (cooling, space, power distribution) amortize across tenants. Single-tenant self-hosted deployments can't achieve this efficiency.

## Related Resources

- [Zilliz Cloud pricing](https://zilliz.com/pricing)
- [Zilliz Cloud managed vector database](https://zilliz.com/what-is-zilliz-cloud)