[knorker]

> By varying pricing, you can be more efficient.

AWS and GCP have spot pricing on VMs, so they do have products that do this.

Maybe that's enough. When Colab load goes low, they can turn down a bunch of Colab tasks, and sell the freed capacity as Spot VM / preemptable VMs.

I'm sure there are many big companies out there that essentially have a standing bid for any compute cheaper than $X, and will soak it up as Spot VMs.

Not every GCP product needs to have spot pricing to be efficient. In fact if you silo capacity per product then you'll be less efficient. E.g. someone is willing to pay for spot VMs, but you only have spot Colab available.