Anyscale as cloud orchestrator - ACU billing, Ray platform, BYOC or hosted

Fetched 2026-10-04. Anyscale is a cloud orchestrator built on Ray. Key structural facts: (1) Uses ACU (Anyscale Compute Unit) as its billing metric - 1 ACU is approximately 1 vCPU + 2GB RAM. (2) Two deployment models: Hosted (Anyscale-managed infrastructure) and BYOC (bring your own cloud - AWS, Azure, GCP, CoreWeave, or on-prem/K8s). (3) Published ACU rates: CPU $0.0135/hr, T4 $0.5682/hr, L4 $0.9542/hr, A10G $1.3635/hr, A100 $4.9591/hr. H/B/GB families all 'Contact Us'. (4) $100 free credit for new accounts. (5) Usage-based billing with no monthly fixed fees on pay-as-you-go. (6) Committed contracts unlock volume discounts. (7) BYOC lets you use existing GPU reservations. The ACU model makes direct price comparison to per-GPU-hour rates difficult without knowing the ACU-to-instance mapping. Anyscale's value proposition is the Ray platform orchestration (distributed computing, autoscaling, model serving) rather than raw price competitiveness.