# Round 2: claim / rating / observed behavior

77 provider identities indexed; 11 selected review excerpts read. The rest are queued. No full-report-completion claim.

The JSONL keeps an attributed account separate from independently established provider behavior. A current article fetch returned 403; the earlier exact retained capture was hash-verified and reused without changing its retrieval time. Paid article text is not republished.

## Price timing
Nebius currently advertises a future schedule effective October 1, 2026: H100 $3.85 to $4.50, H200 $4.50 to $5.40, B200 $7.15 to $8.50, B300 $7.85 to $9.50 per normalized GPU-hour. This establishes the effective date, not the first announcement time or a negotiated-customer price jump. The existing public catalogue already contains these schedules; it was not overwritten.

## Independent behavior
Our DigitalOcean H100 and Hot Aisle MI300X runs concern individual GPU allocations, not the managed service assessed in the report. They stay in the intake lane. Oracle price-list bytes were captured, but matching GPU/SKU quotes were not extracted. AWS and Azure quotes and podcast/livestream transcription remain pending.

## Estate handoff
provider-matrix.jsonl is portable staging. The estate harvest connection was unavailable during this run; nothing was written into its database and no alternate database was invented.

| Provider | Medal | Attributed account | Testable next question |
|---|---|---|---|
| CoreWeave | Platinum | Report uses CoreWeave as a reference and praises its proactive diagnostics. | Test the same acceptance rules on ordinary allocations without defining success relative to the reference vendor. |
| Nebius | Platinum | Report combines technical strength, financing and premium pricing in its Platinum explanation. | Separate operating improvements from seller pricing power; distinguish current quotes from announced future prices. |
| Oracle | Gold | Report describes two clusters and acknowledges an access error caused by its own operator. | Separate reviewer mistakes, default configuration and provider-caused failure in the grade. |
| Google Cloud | Gold | Report upgrades GCP while retaining reservations about its customer interface. | Bind findings to exact managed product, machine generation and support entitlement. |
| Firmus | Silver | Report describes a development cluster, unusual login requirements and initially incomplete defaults. | Record remediation and development-versus-customer conditions before extending observations to a provider-wide grade. |
| Crusoe | Bronze | Report distinguishes successful adjacent businesses from problems in particular managed clusters. | Track which dated cluster observation changed the medal and whether the later repair changed it again. |
| DigitalOcean | Bronze | Report describes manual cluster setup, strong configured performance and monitoring issues. | Keep its managed-cluster findings separate from our single-GPU Droplet run. |
| FluidStack | Unavailable | Report attributes unavailability to a shift toward bare-metal TPU deployments. | Distinguish product-scope exit from failure in an observed customer job. |
| Cirrascale | Unavailable | Report attributes lost collaboration to a dispute over earlier coverage. | Record access/relationship failure separately from measured service failure. |
| Scaleway | Unavailable | Report gives reported engagement changes and a vendor shift as context. | Seek independent provider evidence before treating this attributed account as operational fact. |
| Cudo Compute | Unavailable | Report says a representative managed environment was not supplied for this cycle. | Keep absence of an assessment separate from a low measured score. |