A100 vs V100: cloud rental cost compared
Short answer: pick the A100 when your model or framework expects BF16, or you need INT4-quantized serving kernels (AWQ/GPTQ/Marlin-class). Pick the V100 when you're running an FP16/FP32-only legacy workload and V100 pricing or availability works for you.
You can rent both by the hour, no purchase required. A100 from $0.735/GPU/hr across 7 providers; V100 from $0.060/GPU/hr across 4 providers. The V100 is 92% cheaper at the entry rate.
Specs side by side
Price by provider
Which should you pick: A100 or V100?
The A100 (Ampere) supports BF16 tensor cores and INT4-class quantized serving kernels; the V100 (Volta) supports neither (lib/tools/gpu-capabilities.ts), a real capability floor, not just a speed difference, since a V100 physically cannot run a BF16-native model at native precision. Pick the A100 when your model or framework expects BF16, or you need INT4-quantized serving kernels (AWQ/GPTQ/Marlin-class); pick the V100 when you're running an FP16/FP32-only legacy workload and V100 pricing or availability works for you. On price the V100 undercuts the A100 by 92% at the entry rate ($0.060 vs $0.735/GPU/hr). Worth weighing if the deciding factor above isn't a hard requirement for your job.
Decision criteria
Pick the A100 when
- Your model expects BF16 or needs INT4-quantized serving kernels
- You want the more modern, better-supported architecture
- Your framework's kernels target Ampere or newer
Pick the V100 when
- You're running a legacy FP16/FP32-only pipeline that already works on Volta
- V100 pricing is meaningfully cheaper for your job
- You have no BF16/INT4 dependency at all
Price-performance
At list rates, 1,000 GPU-hours costs $60 on the V100 against $735 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 V100: common questions
Is the A100 or the V100 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 V100 starts at $0.060/GPU/hr (median $0.170/GPU/hr across 4 providers). The V100 is the cheaper of the two at the entry rate, by 92%.
What is the difference between the A100 and the V100?
The A100 has 80 GB of VRAM against the V100's 16 GB; the A100 is an Ampere part and the V100 is Volta (compute capability 8.0 vs 7.0); only the A100 supports BF16, INT4 compute. On price, the A100 lists from $0.735/GPU/hr and the V100 from $0.060/GPU/hr.
Which cloud providers offer the A100 and the V100?
7 providers list the A100 (Vast.ai, RunPod, Verda, Massed Compute, HyperStack, Jarvislabs and Akash) and 4 list the V100 (SimplePod, RunPod, Akash and Vast.ai), across 7 and 4 regions respectively. Both are available from Vast.ai, RunPod and Akash.
How much does 1,000 GPU-hours cost on the A100 vs the V100?
At the lowest rates listed today, 1,000 GPU-hours costs $735 on the A100 and $60 on the V100, a difference of $675 for the same runtime. Rates are per GPU per hour and update hourly.
Can a V100 run BF16 models?
No. Volta (the V100's architecture) has no BF16 tensor cores at all, so a model that expects native BF16 either won't run or has to be cast to FP16/FP32 first, which changes numerics. The A100 (Ampere) supports BF16 natively, which is the real reason to pick it over a V100 for anything but a legacy FP16/FP32 pipeline.
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.
