Canopy helped Geodesic Research source, test and negotiate a 24-month reserved GPU agreement, securing GPUs at approximately 40% below the prevailing market rate. 

“Canopy ran a competitive process and was a significant help in our procurement process: advising on contract norms, facilitating negotiations, and leveraging their established relationship with vendors to guarantee node reservation despite the many changes in our agreement.”

- Alexandra Narin, Chief Operating Officer, Geodesic Research

Key Results

• Lowered GPU Rate: 40% below the prevailing market rate

• Secured Reserved Capacity: 96 GPUs under a 24-month agreement

• Strengthened Contract Protection: 30-day acceptance period with full refund on performance failure

About Geodesic Research

Geodesic Research is a Cambridge-based technical AI safety organisation focused on practical, compute-intensive alignment research. Its work is built around taking the shortest path from research to impact, developing approaches that can be tested at scale and ultimately used by frontier model teams. 

Operational Summary

Geodesic Research engaged Canopy to source, evaluate and negotiate GPU infrastructure for a fixed-budget research programme. The team needed US-based capacity to support a 24-month pretraining programme funded through research grants. Canopy ran providers in parallel, normalised pricing, coordinated technical testing and managed commercial negotiations before securing a 24-month reserved agreement at approximately 40% below the prevailing market rate.

Challenge

Geodesic Research started with a single on-demand quote at an effective $6.42 per GPU hour. Because the programme was grant-funded and contracted through a fiscal sponsor, the final agreement also needed to satisfy the client and funders. Part-way through the procurement process, the deployment had to move from Europe to the United States. That meant a new contracting entity, jurisdiction and service date, while the original European allocation was released.

Solution

Canopy ran shortlisted UK, European and US providers in parallel rather than negotiating with a single supplier. Quotes were compared on a blended GPU-hour rate and 24-month total contract value, with financial, security and operational diligence completed before selection. A two-node proof of concept was then used to validate throughput and interconnect performance against Geodesic Research’s workloads. 

When the deployment moved to the US, Canopy reworked the agreement with the supplier’s US entity and secured a larger allocation without giving back the negotiated European pricing. The final agreement also included stronger uptime and service-credit terms, written capacity commitments and a 30-day acceptance period with a full refund if agreed performance benchmarks were not met.

Key services provided by Canopy Compute included:

• Demand Aggregation: Bringing a partner organisation's requirement alongside the client's turned an 4-node order into a 12 node opportunity, moving the supplier from “not now” to repricing the client from a small buyer into an anchor tenant. 

• Price Protection on Additional Capacity: Eight nodes were locked at $4.79 with a further 16 to 24 held at the same rate, where extra capacity is normally repriced at prevailing markets. Final scope included 12 nodes / 96 GPUs, 3x more than first scoped, at the negotiated rate. 

• Funder Certainty: The additional capacity became a written commitment, backed by an offer of a letter of intent from the supplier's US directors and a defined deposit to hold it. 

• 30-Day Acceptance Period: Canopy negotiated a formal acceptance window with defined performance benchmarks, two cure attempts and a full refund on failure. Giving the most valuable protection in the agreement for a grant-funded buyer. 

• Stronger Contract Terms: Uptime and service credits were rewritten, a power-failure exclusion removed, a key liability cap raised to 100%, confidentiality widened to advisers, auditors, funders and the fiscal sponsor, and the interconnect specification written into the order form. Canopy also caught drafting errors in the supplier's own paper. 

Outcome

Geodesic Research moved from a single on-demand quote to a fully negotiated 24-month reserved GPU agreement. The final deal secured 96 GPUs at approximately 40% below the prevailing market rate, while adding written capacity guarantees, stronger service levels and protections designed for a grant-funded buyer.

“This resulted in a substantially shorter, and more successful process than if we'd continued trying to secure compute ourselves.”

- Alexandra Narin, Chief Operating Officer, Geodesic Research

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