A100 vs L4: Specs, VRAM & Price
Short answer: choose the A100 when 80 GB of VRAM is the gating requirement. Choose the L4 when 23 GB is enough for the workload and the lower hourly rate points that way.
The A100 has 80 GB of VRAM; the L4 has 23 GB.
You can rent both by the hour, no purchase required. A100 from $1.10/GPU/hr; L4 from $0.485/GPU/hr. The L4 is 56% cheaper at the entry rate.
A100
Good for training and inference on models that don't need FP8 kernels
L4
Good for inference and light fine-tuning workloads
Last updated: 2026-10-16 UTCRefreshes every 6 hours
Specs side by side
| Spec | A100 | L4 |
|---|---|---|
| VRAM | 80 GB | 23 GB |
| Memory bandwidth | 2,039 GB/s | 300 GB/s |
| Architecture | Ampere | Ada Lovelace |
| Compute capability | 8.0 | 8.9 |
| Precisions in hardware | FP32, FP16, BF16, INT4 | FP32, FP16, BF16, FP8, INT4 |
| Peak FP16/BF16 tensor TFLOPS | 312 TFLOPS | – |
| NVLink / multi-GPU interconnect | NVLink 3, 600 GB/s | – |
| Max board power (TDP) | 400W (SXM) | 72W |
| Form factor | SXM4 | – |
| Regions | 5 | 1 |
On-demand price
| Rate | A100 | L4 |
|---|---|---|
| Lowest per GPU/hr | $1.50/GPU/hr | $0.485/GPU/hr (cheapest overall) |
Which is better for AI: A100 or L4?
Choose the A100 when 80 GB of VRAM is the gating requirement. Choose the L4 when 23 GB is enough for the workload and the lower hourly rate points that way.
A100 vs L4: common questions
Is the A100 or the L4 better for AI?
Short answer: choose the A100 when 80 GB of VRAM is the gating requirement. Choose the L4 when 23 GB is enough for the workload and the lower hourly rate points that way.
Is the A100 or the L4 cheaper to rent?
On Aquanode's live marketplace the A100 starts at $1.10/GPU/hr (median $1.65/GPU/hr) and the L4 starts at $0.485/GPU/hr (median $0.485/GPU/hr). The L4 is the cheaper of the two at the entry rate, by 56%.
What is the difference between the A100 and the L4?
The A100 has 80 GB of VRAM against the L4's 23 GB; the A100 is an Ampere part and the L4 is Ada Lovelace (compute capability 8.0 vs 8.9); only the L4 supports FP8 compute. On price, the A100 lists from $1.10/GPU/hr and the L4 from $0.485/GPU/hr.
How widely available are the A100 and the L4?
The A100 is listed in 5 regions and the L4 in 1 region right now.
How much does 1,000 GPU-hours cost on the A100 vs the L4?
At the lowest rates listed today, 1,000 GPU-hours costs $1,102 on the A100 and $485 on the L4, a difference of $617 for the same runtime. Rates are per GPU per hour and update hourly.
How much VRAM does the A100 have compared to the L4?
The A100 has 80 GB of VRAM; the L4 has 23 GB.
Does the A100 or the L4 support NVLink?
The A100 supports NVLink 3, 600 GB/s; the L4 has no dedicated GPU-to-GPU interconnect.
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 L4 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 L4 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 L4 comparisons
Related reading: A100 pricing and specs, A100 vs H100, A100 vs V100, and The best GPUs for AI, ranked.
