A40 vs A100: cloud rental cost compared
Short answer: pick the A100 when you're training or running bandwidth-bound large-batch inference. Pick the A40 when your workload is lighter-weight (rendering, virtualization, small-batch inference) and the lower cost matters more.
You can rent both by the hour, no purchase required. A100 from $0.734/GPU/hr across 7 providers; A40 from $0.075/GPU/hr across 2 providers. The A40 is 90% cheaper at the entry rate.
Specs side by side
Price by provider
Which should you pick: A40 or A100?
The A100 has just under 3x the memory bandwidth of the A40, 2,039 GB/s of HBM2e against 696 GB/s of GDDR6 (NVIDIA product pages, Aug 2026), which matters for training and large-batch inference, while the A40 is positioned as a workstation/virtualization card with lower cost. Pick the A100 when you're training or running bandwidth-bound large-batch inference; pick the A40 when your workload is lighter-weight (rendering, virtualization, small-batch inference) and the lower cost matters more. On price the A40 undercuts the A100 by 90% at the entry rate ($0.075 vs $0.734/GPU/hr). Worth weighing if the deciding factor above isn't a hard requirement for your job.
Decision criteria
Pick the A100 when
- You're training or fine-tuning and need the bandwidth
- Your job is large-batch and bandwidth-bound
- You need the highest-throughput option for the job regardless of cost
Pick the A40 when
- Your workload is lighter: rendering, virtualization, small-batch inference
- You want a lower hourly rate for a job that isn't bandwidth-bound
- A40 availability is better in your region
Price-performance
At list rates, 1,000 GPU-hours costs $75 on the A40 against $734 on the A100. Neither NVIDIA nor Aquanode publishes a workload-normalized $/token or $/epoch figure for this pair, so $/GPU-hour below is the only apples-to-apples number. A faster card can still cost less per finished job even at a higher hourly rate.
A100 vs A40: common questions
Is the A100 or the A40 cheaper to rent?
On Aquanode's live marketplace the A100 starts at $0.734/GPU/hr (median $1.59/GPU/hr across 7 providers) and the A40 starts at $0.075/GPU/hr (median $0.490/GPU/hr across 2 providers). The A40 is the cheaper of the two at the entry rate, by 90%.
What is the difference between the A100 and the A40?
The A100 has 80 GB of VRAM against the A40's 48 GB; both are Ampere parts; both run BF16, INT4 workloads in hardware. On price, the A100 lists from $0.734/GPU/hr and the A40 from $0.075/GPU/hr.
Which cloud providers offer the A100 and the A40?
7 providers list the A100 (Vast.ai, RunPod, Verda, Massed Compute, HyperStack, Jarvislabs and Akash) and 2 list the A40 (Vultr and RunPod), across 7 and 2 regions respectively. Both are available from RunPod.
How much does 1,000 GPU-hours cost on the A100 vs the A40?
At the lowest rates listed today, 1,000 GPU-hours costs $734 on the A100 and $75 on the A40, a difference of $659 for the same runtime. Rates are per GPU per hour and update hourly.
Can the A40 substitute for an A100 to save money?
For lighter workloads, yes. But the A100's 2,039 GB/s of bandwidth against the A40's 696 GB/s (NVIDIA, Aug 2026) means a bandwidth-bound training job will be meaningfully slower on an A40, which can erase the savings. The A40 lists from $0.075/GPU/hr against the A100's $0.734/GPU/hr on Aquanode today.
How this comparison is calculated
Every price is normalized to a per-GPU hourly rate using the same pipeline as every other pricing surface on Aquanode, and only the cheapest qualifying offer per provider is shown. A dash means that provider does not currently list that GPU.
Architecture, compute capability and supported precisions come from each vendor's published datasheet for that generation, not from the marketplace feed. This page regenerates at most once per hour.
