A100 vs H100: cloud rental cost compared
Short answer: pick the H100 when you're serving or fine-tuning models with FP8/INT8 quantization, or you're bandwidth-bound on large-batch inference. Pick the A100 when your stack is BF16/FP32-only, FP8 buys you nothing, and the lower hourly rate matters more than raw throughput.
You can rent both by the hour, no purchase required. A100 from $0.735/GPU/hr across 7 providers; H100 from $1.99/GPU/hr across 8 providers. The A100 is 63% cheaper at the entry rate.
Specs side by side
Price by provider
Which should you pick: A100 or H100?
The H100 adds FP8 tensor cores with a Transformer Engine and 3.35 TB/s of HBM3 bandwidth against the A100's 2,039 GB/s of HBM2e (NVIDIA H100 and A100 datasheets, Aug 2026). A real capability gap for serving or fine-tuning modern LLMs, not just a clock-speed bump. Pick the H100 when you're serving or fine-tuning models with FP8/INT8 quantization, or you're bandwidth-bound on large-batch inference; pick the A100 when your stack is BF16/FP32-only, FP8 buys you nothing, and the lower hourly rate matters more than raw throughput. On price the A100 undercuts the H100 by 63% at the entry rate ($0.735 vs $1.99/GPU/hr). Worth weighing if the deciding factor above isn't a hard requirement for your job.
Decision criteria
Pick the A100 when
- Your pipeline is BF16/TF32 training or inference with no FP8 kernel in the stack
- You want the lowest entry price for large-batch throughput
- You're running an established workflow already tuned for Ampere
Pick the H100 when
- You're serving quantized (FP8/INT8) LLMs in production
- You're bandwidth-bound on large-batch inference
- You're training a frontier-scale model and can absorb the higher hourly rate
Price-performance
At list rates, 1,000 GPU-hours costs $735 on the A100 against $1,990 on the H100. 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 H100: common questions
Is the A100 or the H100 cheaper to rent?
On Aquanode's live marketplace the A100 starts at $0.735/GPU/hr (median $1.59/GPU/hr across 7 providers) and the H100 starts at $1.99/GPU/hr (median $3.17/GPU/hr across 8 providers). The A100 is the cheaper of the two at the entry rate, by 63%.
What is the difference between the A100 and the H100?
Both cards report 80 GB of VRAM; the A100 is an Ampere part and the H100 is Hopper (compute capability 8.0 vs 9.0); only the H100 supports FP8 compute. On price, the A100 lists from $0.735/GPU/hr and the H100 from $1.99/GPU/hr.
Which cloud providers offer the A100 and the H100?
7 providers list the A100 (Vast.ai, RunPod, Verda, Massed Compute, HyperStack, Jarvislabs and Akash) and 8 list the H100 (RunPod, Massed Compute, HyperStack, Jarvislabs, Akash, Vast.ai, Verda and Nebius), across 7 and 8 regions respectively. Both are available from Vast.ai, RunPod, Verda, Massed Compute, HyperStack, Jarvislabs and Akash.
How much does 1,000 GPU-hours cost on the A100 vs the H100?
At the lowest rates listed today, 1,000 GPU-hours costs $735 on the A100 and $1,990 on the H100, a difference of $1,255 for the same runtime. Rates are per GPU per hour and update hourly.
Is the H100 worth the extra cost over the A100?
Only if your workload actually uses FP8. The A100 has no FP8 tensor cores at all, so a BF16-only pipeline gets no benefit from the H100's Transformer Engine. The H100 currently lists from $1.99/GPU/hr against the A100's $0.735/GPU/hr on Aquanode, so the premium only pays for itself when FP8 or the extra HBM3 bandwidth is actually load-bearing for your job.
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.
