A40 vs L4: cloud rental cost compared
You can rent both by the hour, no purchase required. A40 from $0.075/GPU/hr across 2 providers; L4 from $0.490/GPU/hr across 1 provider. The A40 is 85% cheaper at the entry rate.
Specs side by side
Price by provider
A40 vs L4: common questions
Is the A40 or the L4 cheaper to rent?
On Aquanode's live marketplace the A40 starts at $0.075/GPU/hr (median $0.440/GPU/hr across 2 providers) and the L4 starts at $0.490/GPU/hr (median $0.490/GPU/hr across 1 provider). The A40 is the cheaper of the two at the entry rate, by 85%.
What is the difference between the A40 and the L4?
The A40 has 48 GB of VRAM against the L4's 24 GB; the A40 is an Ampere part and the L4 is Ada Lovelace (compute capability 8.6 vs 8.9); only the L4 supports FP8 compute. On price, the A40 lists from $0.075/GPU/hr and the L4 from $0.490/GPU/hr.
Which cloud providers offer the A40 and the L4?
2 providers list the A40 (Vultr and RunPod) and 1 list the L4 (RunPod), across 2 and 1 region respectively. Both are available from RunPod.
How much does 1,000 GPU-hours cost on the A40 vs the L4?
At the lowest rates listed today, 1,000 GPU-hours costs $75 on the A40 and $490 on the L4, a difference of $415 for the same runtime. Rates are per GPU per hour and update hourly.
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.
