A100 vs DGX A100: Specs, VRAM & Price
Short answer: choose the A100 when you want the lower hourly rate and the specs are otherwise a wash. Choose the DGX A100 when DGX A100 pricing or availability works better where you're deploying.
Both the A100 and the DGX A100 ship with 80 GB of VRAM.
You can rent both by the hour, no purchase required. A100 from $1.26/GPU/hr; DGX A100 from $1.52/GPU/hr. The A100 is 17% cheaper at the entry rate.
A100
Good for training and inference on models that don't need FP8 kernels
DGX A100
Good for training and inference on models that don't need FP8 kernels
Last updated: 2026-11-03 UTCRefreshes every 6 hours
Specs side by side
| Spec | A100 | DGX A100 |
|---|---|---|
| VRAM | 80 GB | 80 GB |
| Memory bandwidth | 2,039 GB/s | – |
| Architecture | Ampere | Ampere |
| Compute capability | 8.0 | 8.0 |
| Precisions in hardware | FP32, FP16, BF16, INT4 | FP32, FP16, BF16, INT4 |
| Peak FP16/BF16 tensor TFLOPS | 312 TFLOPS | – |
| NVLink / multi-GPU interconnect | NVLink 3, 600 GB/s | – |
| Max board power (TDP) | 400W (SXM) | – |
| Form factor | SXM4 | – |
| Regions | 5 | 1 |
On-demand price
| Rate | A100 | DGX A100 |
|---|---|---|
| Lowest per GPU/hr | $1.49/GPU/hr | $1.52/GPU/hr |
Which is better for AI: A100 or DGX A100?
Choose the A100 when you want the lower hourly rate and the specs are otherwise a wash. Choose the DGX A100 when DGX A100 pricing or availability works better where you're deploying.
A100 vs DGX A100: common questions
Is the A100 or the DGX A100 better for AI?
Short answer: choose the A100 when you want the lower hourly rate and the specs are otherwise a wash. Choose the DGX A100 when DGX A100 pricing or availability works better where you're deploying.
Is the A100 or the DGX A100 cheaper to rent?
On Aquanode's live marketplace the A100 starts at $1.26/GPU/hr (median $1.52/GPU/hr) and the DGX A100 starts at $1.52/GPU/hr (median $1.52/GPU/hr). The A100 is the cheaper of the two at the entry rate, by 17%.
What is the difference between the A100 and the DGX A100?
Both cards report 80 GB of VRAM; both are Ampere parts; both run BF16, INT4 workloads in hardware. On price, the A100 lists from $1.26/GPU/hr and the DGX A100 from $1.52/GPU/hr.
How widely available are the A100 and the DGX A100?
The A100 is listed in 5 regions and the DGX A100 in 1 region right now.
How much does 1,000 GPU-hours cost on the A100 vs the DGX A100?
At the lowest rates listed today, 1,000 GPU-hours costs $1,264 on the A100 and $1,518 on the DGX A100, a difference of $254 for the same runtime. Rates are per GPU per hour and update hourly.
How much VRAM does the A100 have compared to the DGX A100?
Both the A100 and the DGX A100 ship with 80 GB of VRAM.
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.
Memory bandwidth, tensor TFLOPS, NVLink/interconnect and max board power are the same verified-from-datasheet figures shown on each model's own A100 page and DGX A100 page, which link the primary vendor source for that model. A dash here means Aquanode hasn't verified that figure from a primary source yet, never a guess.
Go further
Check what fits in each card's memory with the A100 VRAM calculator and the DGX A100 VRAM calculator, see vendor-published throughput in the GPU benchmarks and specs table, or browse every model by generation in the GPU index.
More A100 comparisons
More DGX A100 comparisons
Related reading: A100 pricing and specs, A100 vs H100, A100 vs V100, and The best GPUs for AI, ranked.
