The Power BI Premium licence is not a per-user license like a Free or Pro License. Instead, Power BI Premium license provides a dedicated unit of capacity for all users in the organization. This dedicated capacity (aka Premium Workspace) can be used to host large datasets up to 50GB while offering a total storage of 100TB in the cloud.
It enables your organization to use your own dedicated capacity and hardware rather than relying on Microsoft’s shared capacity. Although you will in fact need to determine said capacity accurately and ensure that it has the capabilities to handle your reporting and analysis needs. This allows for much larger scale and better performance if you size the capacity properly. Microsoft offers three sizes for Premium capacity and each come with a different number of v-cores and memory size.
Who is Power BI Premium for?
Power BI Premium is for use in large organizations with a great number of users that need to collaborate in real time. The application is geared towards addressing the challenges of large enterprise deployments and workloads.
Power BI Premium Cost
The Premium plan starts at $4,995 a month per dedicated cloud compute and storage resource. This does not include the cost of licensing for individual Pro and Free licenses required for each user in your organization.
How to get Power BI Premium?
Power BI Premium is a tenant-level Office 365 subscription available in two SKU (Stock-Keeping Unit) families:
- EM SKUs (EM1-EM3) for embedding, requiring a yearly commitment, billed monthly.
- P SKUs (P1-P3) for embedding and enterprise features, requiring a monthly or yearly commitment, billed monthly, and includes a license to install Power BI Report Server on-premises.
Furthermore, Power BI Premium subscriptions can be purchased by administrators in the Microsoft 365 admin Centre. To be more specific, only Office 365 Global administrators or Billing Administrators can actually make purchases as they have designated authority. Once the capacity has been purchased, you will receive the corresponding number of v-cores to assigned to the capacity you have chosen, known as v-core pooling. For example, purchasing a P3 SKU provides the tenant with 32 v-cores for data processing etc.