A40 vs H100: Specs, VRAM & Price
Short answer: choose the H100 when 80 GB of VRAM is the gating requirement. Choose the A40 when 45 GB is enough for the workload and the lower hourly rate points that way.
The A40 has 45 GB of VRAM; the H100 has 80 GB.
You can rent both by the hour, no purchase required. A40 from $0.709/GPU/hr; H100 from $2.78/GPU/hr. The A40 is 74% cheaper at the entry rate.
A40
Good for training and inference on models that don't need FP8 kernels
H100
Good for training and serving frontier-scale LLMs
Last updated: 2026-11-03 UTCRefreshes every 6 hours
Specs side by side
| Spec | A40 | H100 |
|---|---|---|
| VRAM | 45 GB | 80 GB |
| Memory bandwidth | – | 3.35 TB/s |
| Architecture | Ampere | Hopper |
| Compute capability | 8.6 | 9.0 |
| Precisions in hardware | FP32, FP16, BF16, INT4 | FP32, FP16, BF16, FP8, INT4 |
| Peak FP16/BF16 tensor TFLOPS | – | 989 TFLOPS |
| Peak FP8 tensor TFLOPS | – | 1,979 TFLOPS |
| NVLink / multi-GPU interconnect | – | NVLink 4, 900 GB/s bidirectional |
| Max board power (TDP) | – | Up to 700W (configurable) |
| Form factor | – | SXM5 |
| Regions | 1 | 7 |
On-demand price
| Rate | A40 | H100 |
|---|---|---|
| Lowest per GPU/hr | $0.709/GPU/hr (cheapest overall) | $2.78/GPU/hr |
Which is better for AI: A40 or H100?
Choose the H100 when 80 GB of VRAM is the gating requirement. Choose the A40 when 45 GB is enough for the workload and the lower hourly rate points that way.
A40 vs H100: common questions
Is the A40 or the H100 better for AI?
Short answer: choose the H100 when 80 GB of VRAM is the gating requirement. Choose the A40 when 45 GB is enough for the workload and the lower hourly rate points that way.
Is the A40 or the H100 cheaper to rent?
On Aquanode's live marketplace the A40 starts at $0.709/GPU/hr (median $0.755/GPU/hr) and the H100 starts at $2.78/GPU/hr (median $3.83/GPU/hr). The A40 is the cheaper of the two at the entry rate, by 74%.
What is the difference between the A40 and the H100?
The A40 has 45 GB of VRAM against the H100's 80 GB; the A40 is an Ampere part and the H100 is Hopper (compute capability 8.6 vs 9.0); only the H100 supports FP8 compute. On price, the A40 lists from $0.709/GPU/hr and the H100 from $2.78/GPU/hr.
How widely available are the A40 and the H100?
The A40 is listed in 1 region and the H100 in 7 regions right now.
How much does 1,000 GPU-hours cost on the A40 vs the H100?
At the lowest rates listed today, 1,000 GPU-hours costs $709 on the A40 and $2,778 on the H100, a difference of $2,069 for the same runtime. Rates are per GPU per hour and update hourly.
How much VRAM does the A40 have compared to the H100?
The A40 has 45 GB of VRAM; the H100 has 80 GB.
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 A40 page and H100 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 A40 VRAM calculator and the H100 VRAM calculator, see vendor-published throughput in the GPU benchmarks and specs table, or browse every model by generation in the GPU index.
More A40 comparisons
More H100 comparisons
Related reading: H100 pricing and specs, H100 vs H200, A100 vs H100, H100 and H200: SXM vs NVL vs PCIe, and The best GPUs for AI, ranked.
