1Legion's Bare-Metal Blackwell Server Targets Egress-Fee Fatigue in Streaming

The offering directly challenges the hyperscaler cost model for always-on video workloads, where egress fees can dominate monthly infrastructure bills at scale. By pricing a dedicated eight-GPU Blackwell node with unmetered bandwidth at $1.34 per GPU per hour, 1Legion removes the two biggest budget variables — data-transfer costs and performance variability — for operators running 24/7 transcoding pipelines. The product enters a market where bare-metal GPU infrastructure is gaining traction for streaming workloads, as Netflix (Open Connect) and Twitch have already shifted video delivery to dedicated hardware to avoid cloud cost unpredictability. 1Legion's earlier partnership with StreamVX, a software-defined video platform (per Content+Technology, May 2026), signals it is building toward an end-to-end media stack, not just selling raw compute. Watch whether media SaaS vendors adopt the Pro 6000 Blackwell's 9th-gen NVENC engines with 4:2:2 encoding support for broadcast-grade transcoding, and whether the unmetered bandwidth model holds under sustained multi-petabyte delivery loads.

NVIDIA launched the RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell series at its GTC conference on March 18, 2025, positioning the Server Edition as a universal data center GPU for AI inference, rendering, and video processing. The GPU's 9th-generation NVENC and 6th-generation NVDEC engines introduced native 4:2:2 H.264 and HEVC encoding support — a first for NVIDIA professional GPUs — and doubled H.264 decoding throughput versus the prior generation (per NVIDIA, March 2025). System partners including Cisco, Dell, HPE, Lenovo, and Supermicro announced plans to ship RTX PRO 6000 Server Edition configurations, with cloud providers AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and CoreWeave also lined up to offer instances.

1Legion began expanding the RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell server beyond North America in January 2026, adding availability in Europe and Canada to serve media operators with data residency requirements (per 1Legion's blog, January 2026). In May 2026, the company announced a partnership with StreamVX, a software-defined video platform serving European and North American broadcasters, to integrate bare-metal GPU infrastructure with StreamVX's vxOS for transcoding, live channel packaging, and OTT delivery (per Content+Technology, May 2026). That partnership initially deployed on RTX 4000 Ada and A4000 GPU servers — lower-tier cards than the Pro 6000 — suggesting 1Legion is tiering its media offerings by workload intensity.

The no-egress-fee pitch targets a well-documented pain point. As of June 2026, AWS CloudFront charges $0.085/GB for the first 10 TB of egress, Azure CDN charges $0.087/GB, and Google Cloud CDN Premium Tier charges $0.12/GB (per EgressCost.com, verified June 2026). For a streaming platform serving 100 TB per month — roughly 10,000 concurrent viewers at 1080p — hyperscale egress alone costs $8,500–$12,000 monthly. Hivelocity, another bare-metal provider, published an analysis in December 2025 arguing that dedicated servers deliver 3–5x better economics than virtualized cloud equivalents for steady-state live streaming, citing Netflix's Open Connect and Twitch's bare-metal PoP architecture as precedent.