H100 vs H200: cloud rental cost compared
Short answer: pick the H200 when your model plus KV cache doesn't fit in 80GB, or you're bandwidth-bound on inference. Pick the H100 when 80GB is enough for your model and you'd rather take the lower hourly rate and wider provider selection.
You can rent both by the hour, no purchase required. H100 from $1.99/GPU/hr across 8 providers; H200 from $3.59/GPU/hr across 7 providers. The H100 is 45% cheaper at the entry rate.
Specs side by side
Price by provider
Which should you pick: H100 or H200?
The H200 carries 141GB of HBM3e at 4.8 TB/s against the H100's 80GB of HBM3 at 3.35 TB/s (NVIDIA, Aug 2026). NVIDIA's own copy calls it "nearly double the capacity" with "1.4x more memory bandwidth," which mostly matters for serving larger models or longer context windows without sharding. Pick the H200 when your model plus KV cache doesn't fit in 80GB, or you're bandwidth-bound on inference; pick the H100 when 80GB is enough for your model and you'd rather take the lower hourly rate and wider provider selection. On price the H100 undercuts the H200 by 45% at the entry rate ($1.99 vs $3.59/GPU/hr). Worth weighing if the deciding factor above isn't a hard requirement for your job.
Decision criteria
Pick the H100 when
- Your model and KV cache fit inside 80GB with room to spare
- You want the wider provider selection and lower hourly rate
- You're doing FP8 inference at a scale the H100 already handles
Pick the H200 when
- You're serving a model too large or too long-context to fit on an H100
- You're bandwidth-bound and need the extra 1.4x throughput
- You want headroom against future model growth without re-architecting
Price-performance
At list rates, 1,000 GPU-hours costs $1,990 on the H100 against $3,590 on the H200. 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.
H100 vs H200: common questions
Is the H100 or the H200 cheaper to rent?
On Aquanode's live marketplace the H100 starts at $1.99/GPU/hr (median $3.19/GPU/hr across 8 providers) and the H200 starts at $3.59/GPU/hr (median $4.50/GPU/hr across 7 providers). The H100 is the cheaper of the two at the entry rate, by 45%.
What is the difference between the H100 and the H200?
The H100 has 80 GB of VRAM against the H200's 141 GB; both are Hopper parts; both run BF16, FP8, INT4 workloads in hardware. On price, the H100 lists from $1.99/GPU/hr and the H200 from $3.59/GPU/hr.
Which cloud providers offer the H100 and the H200?
8 providers list the H100 (RunPod, Massed Compute, HyperStack, Jarvislabs, Akash, Vast.ai, Verda and Nebius) and 7 list the H200 (RunPod, Massed Compute, Jarvislabs, Vast.ai, Verda, Nebius and Akash), across 7 and 7 regions respectively. Both are available from RunPod, Massed Compute, Jarvislabs, Akash, Vast.ai, Verda and Nebius.
How much does 1,000 GPU-hours cost on the H100 vs the H200?
At the lowest rates listed today, 1,000 GPU-hours costs $1,990 on the H100 and $3,590 on the H200, a difference of $1,600 for the same runtime. Rates are per GPU per hour and update hourly.
Is the H200 just an H100 with more memory?
Mostly, yes. Same Hopper compute (FP8 tensor cores, same generation), but 141GB of HBM3e at 4.8 TB/s versus the H100's 80GB HBM3 at 3.35 TB/s (NVIDIA, Aug 2026). That extra headroom carries a price: the H200 lists from $3.59/GPU/hr against the H100's $1.99/GPU/hr on Aquanode today.
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.
