Power BI Premium is a capacity-based subscription license similar in concept to Power BI Embedded. Like Power BI Embedded, this means that increments of capacity in the form of virtual CPU cores and memory are purchased. Unlike Power BI Embedded, these capacities are purchased on a monthly—not an hourly—basis. These increments of capacity are called node types and range in size from a P1 with eight virtual cores and 25 GB of RAM for approximately $5,000/month to a P5 with 128 virtual cores and 400 GB of RAM for approximately $80,000/month. In addition to this capacity licensing, report authors also need to license Power BI Pro for the standard license cost of $9.99 per user per month.

As opposed to Power BI Embedded, all of Power BI Premium's SKUs provide dedicated capacity, and are intended to serve both internal and external users. Power BI Premium also increases a single dataset size to 10 GB and supports up to 48 refreshes per day with a minimum time between refreshes of 1 minute. Finally, Power BI Premium unlocks enterprise features such as the ability to publish paginated reports, incremental refresh, and multi-geo support.

Power BI Premium's SKUs also provide a license for Power BI Report Server. The same number of virtual cores that are provisioned for Power BI Premium in the cloud can also be used for Power BI Report Server, although you should check the latest documentation from Microsoft since the exact licensing model changes over time.