Bare metal

Bare metal is a dedicated physical server rented to a single customer with no virtualization layer imposed by the provider — the customer gets direct access to the hardware and full control of the operating system. Compared with virtual machines, bare metal eliminates hypervisor overhead and noisy-neighbor effects, delivering consistent performance for databases, HPC, GPU workloads, and latency-sensitive applications; customers can still run their own hypervisor or Kubernetes on top. Bare metal cloud services (OVHcloud, Vultr, Hetzner, IBM Cloud, and others) provision physical servers via API in minutes, blurring the line between colocation and cloud. Most GPU clouds and neoclouds deliver capacity as bare metal or thin-provisioned nodes, since AI training frameworks want direct access to GPUs and network fabrics.