High CPU Droplets can be created via the DigitalOcean API like any other Droplet. In order to use them, provide a “size slug” prefixed with c- when creating your Droplet.

For example:

curl -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
    -H "Authorization: Bearer $DO_TOKEN" \
    -d '{"name":"example.com","region":"nyc3","size":"c-32","image":"ubuntu-14-04-x64", "monitoring": true, "tags":["web"]}' \
    "https://api.digitalocean.com/v2/droplets"

High CPU Droplets may have limited availability in certain datacenters. When a Droplet create is unsuccessful because of insufficient capacity, the API call will return an error message in the following format with 422 for the HTTP status code. The available_regions key will contain a list of regions which can currently handle the desired High-CPU Droplet of that size at that time.

{
  "id": "unprocessable_entity",
  "message": "The size you selected is temporarily unavailable because of High CPU server capacity",
  "error_attributes": {
    "available_regions": [
      "nyc3",
      "nyc1",
      "sfo2"
    ]
  }
}