Provisioned throughput (PTU)
Provisioned throughput is reserved model capacity: you pay for a fixed amount of processing per hour, whether or not you use it, in return for predictable throughput and latency. On Microsoft Azure it is measured in provisioned throughput units (PTUs).
Why it matters for companies
Pay-per-token capacity is shared with other customers and can be throttled at peak times. Provisioned capacity is held for your deployment alone.
Microsoft's documentation sets out the trade-offs: provisioned deployments are billed per PTU per hour regardless of the tokens consumed, PTU quota is granted per subscription, region and deployment type, and having quota does not guarantee that capacity is available.
Example
A bank's customer chatbot needs steady response times at 9:00 on Monday mornings, so it reserves PTUs for one model in one Azure region and pays for them around the clock, including nights and weekends.
How Standard Compute handles it
Point Claude Code and Claude Desktop at Standard Compute and your team stops hitting 5-hour and weekly caps: agents run until the monthly budget is used. Claude is served across several clouds, so one provider's quota or outage doesn't stop your work.
Related pages
- Azure OpenAI quotas, PTU and 429s
- Amazon Bedrock Claude quotas
- Rate limit vs quota
- Enterprise AI glossary