NVIDIA GPU rental prices have surged by 48% in the past two months, reaching $4.08 per hour for the latest Blackwell chips, as the AI industry faces its worst compute shortage in five years. This increase, reported by Ornn’s Compute Price Index, highlights the severe supply crisis impacting the sector, with services frequently going offline and products being canceled. The shortage has significantly affected companies like Anthropic, whose Claude API's uptime fell below industry standards. OpenAI is also struggling, with API token processing volumes more than doubling since last year, forcing the company to make difficult trade-offs, including shutting down its video generation app Sora. Analysts expect the supply-demand imbalance to continue until at least 2029.