A Common Failure, in One Line
> "They came in with the lowest bid, but after a year of operation, GPU utilization was stuck at 30%."
We've heard this sentence in more than half of the public-sector HPC/AI infrastructure projects we've seen. The cause is a single thing — an RFP scorecard where the price weighting is 50% or higher.
When Price Weighting Is Too High
1. Bidders cut specs to hit the lowest price. - Downgrading memory per GPU node, swapping the fabric from IB to cheap RoCE, reducing storage NSDs. 2. They hide operating costs. - Five-year maintenance gets left out, or FTE estimates are unrealistic. 3. The verification stage gets weaker. - Vague acceptance criteria become the seeds of later disputes.
The Weighting We Recommend (assuming five years of operations)
| Item | Weight | Notes | |------|------|------| | Technical evaluation | 60% | Specs, architecture, performance, scalability | | Price (5-year TCO) | 30% | CapEx + OpEx combined | | Company trust | 10% | References of similar scale, financial soundness |
The key is evaluating price on 5-year TCO. Comparing CapEx alone hides the inefficiency of the operations phase.
Questions Buyers Ask Often
Q. Isn't 30% too low?
When a cheap proposal comes in, it automatically earns at least one more point. Even at 30% there is enough separation. Raise it to 50% and the technical score loses its discriminating power, so price ends up deciding.
Q. Our organization's policy is 50% — what do we do?
If you can't cut the top-level category (price) down to 30%, restore discriminating power by adding qualitative items inside the technical evaluation (opinionated architectural reasoning, whether the bidder has operations-automation tooling, post-deployment support SLA).
State All Acceptance Criteria in the RFP
As important as the scorecard are the acceptance criteria.
- HPL efficiency ≥ 95% theoretical - NCCL all-reduce ≥ 94% peak (at a specified node count) - IOR write ≥ X GB/s - Metadata ops ≥ Y/s - Post-deployment SLA: 4-hour first response / 24-hour resolution
If these criteria aren't in the RFP, disputes will follow.
Tooling
/resources/rfp-template includes the 30% weighting model plus acceptance-criteria templates.