SemiAnalysis
ClusterMAX 2.0 — Bronze

BuzzHPC

Meets minimum criteria. Last category we directly recommend; often with inconsistent support or networking gaps.

ByJordan NanosDaniel NishballDylan Patel
Published

BuzzHPC Quick Stats

ClusterMAX Tier
Bronze (2 / 5)
Source Rating Cycle
ClusterMAX 2.0
GPUs Offered
Not detailed in review
Slurm Support
Discussed in review
Kubernetes Support
Not flagged
SOC 2 Mentioned
Not flagged
NCCL Benchmarks
In review
Last Updated
Nov 06, 2025

Want to model BuzzHPC cluster cost? Calculate H100, H200, B200 & GB200 NVL72 TCO with the ClusterMAX calculator.

BuzzHPC is the AI division of HIVE Digital Technologies (fka HIVE Blockchain), a crypto mining focused on cool climates with green energy (Canada, Iceland, Sweden). HIVE pivoted into the AI cloud market in 2022 when they acquired a 50MW facility in New Brunswick, Canada from GPU Atlantic, aka gpu.one.

Source: our sources

In our testing, the Slurm cluster we got had almost everything wrong with it that we’ve seen in this testing, all at once. It was almost impressive. Here is a list:

  • initially, no control plane machine

  • initially, no NFS mount, and then user’s default workdir was not on the shared filesystem

  • initially, no passwordless ssh between nodes

  • docker and the nvidia container toolkit not installed on the worker nodes

  • modules not installed, also no hpcx, nccl, nvcc

  • no pyxis or enroot

  • dcgmi background health checks not installed, or enabled

  • no prolog or epilog configured, no active health checks

  • no montoring dashboard

To get around all of this, we ran a 2-node nccl test with the pytorch-bundled libnccl. Unfortunately, we did not see expected bandwidth (we about 10x lower than expected). This was weird, because ibstat showed 8x 400Gb CX-7 in the nodes.

So, we quickly confirmed that both GPUDirect RDMA was not installed, and ACS was not turned off.

The BuzzHPC Console

To their credit, the BuzzHPC team was responsive and worked with us over several days to resolve some of the issues we identified. They’ve also committed to building our feedback into their default slurm offering going forward.

However, even after these fixes, the cluster does not meet the standards we expect for usability, monitoring and health checks. It seems that BuzzHPC’s platform is still actively in development. We look forward to seeing more from BuzzHPC in the future.

BuzzHPC GPU Cloud FAQ

What tier is BuzzHPC in ClusterMAX?

BuzzHPC is rated Bronze tier in the ClusterMAX 2.0 GPU cloud rating system by SemiAnalysis (with the ClusterMAX 2.1 Update applied April 2026). Bronze is the lowest tier ClusterMAX directly recommends. Meets minimum criteria. Last category we directly recommend; often with inconsistent support or networking gaps.

Is BuzzHPC SOC 2 Type II certified?

BuzzHPC's ClusterMAX review does not flag a SOC 2 Type II attestation as confirmed. SemiAnalysis treats SOC 2 Type II as a baseline expectation for any GPU cloud serving enterprise or regulated AI workloads — see the ClusterMAX criteria page for the full security baseline.

Does BuzzHPC support Slurm?

Yes. The BuzzHPC review on ClusterMAX covers their Slurm offering — including whether it is managed, self-managed, or runs as Slurm-on-Kubernetes (SUNK, Soperator, or Slinky). See the Orchestration section of the review for the specific Slurm flavor offered and SemiAnalysis' hands-on experience.

Does BuzzHPC support Kubernetes?

BuzzHPC's ClusterMAX review does not document a first-party managed Kubernetes service. See the ClusterMAX /k8s expectations page for the managed-Kubernetes bar SemiAnalysis tests against when evaluating GPU cloud providers.

What GPUs does BuzzHPC offer?

The BuzzHPC ClusterMAX review covers their current GPU inventory and on-demand availability. SemiAnalysis tracks H100, H200, B200, GB200 NVL72, GB300 NVL72, and MI300X / MI355X availability across all 85 providers in the ClusterMAX 2.0 + 2.1 cohort.

What is the NCCL all-reduce performance on BuzzHPC?

The BuzzHPC review on ClusterMAX includes hands-on NCCL all-reduce results from SemiAnalysis testing. NCCL bandwidth (in GB/s) is one of the most important indicators of training cluster health — see the Networking section of the review for the specific numbers and how they compare to the ClusterMAX cohort.

How does BuzzHPC compare to CoreWeave?

CoreWeave is the only ClusterMAX Platinum provider, while BuzzHPC is rated Bronze. The BuzzHPC review documents the specific gaps versus CoreWeave across the 10 ClusterMAX criteria (Security, Lifecycle, Orchestration, Storage, Networking, Reliability, Monitoring, Pricing, Partnerships, Availability). See the BuzzHPC review body and the ClusterMAX /criteria page for the full comparison framework.

Is BuzzHPC recommended for LLM training?

BuzzHPC is in a ClusterMAX tier that SemiAnalysis directly recommends for production GPU workloads (Platinum / Gold / Silver / Bronze). The BuzzHPC review details which workload profiles fit best — large-scale pretraining, fine-tuning, on-demand experimentation, or inference — based on hands-on cluster testing.

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