H100 vs L40: Specs, VRAM & Price
Short answer: choose the H100 when 80 GB of VRAM is the gating requirement. Choose the L40 when 48 GB is enough for the workload and the lower hourly rate points that way.
The H100 has 80 GB of VRAM; the L40 has 48 GB.
You can rent both by the hour, no purchase required. H100 from $2.78/GPU/hr; L40 from $0.850/GPU/hr. The L40 is 69% cheaper at the entry rate.
H100
Good for training and serving frontier-scale LLMs
L40
Good for fine-tuning mid-size models and high-throughput inference
Last updated: 2026-11-03 UTCRefreshes every 6 hours
Specs side by side
| Spec | H100 | L40 |
|---|---|---|
| VRAM | 80 GB | 48 GB |
| Memory bandwidth | 3.35 TB/s | 864 GB/s |
| Architecture | Hopper | Ada Lovelace |
| Compute capability | 9.0 | 8.9 |
| Precisions in hardware | FP32, FP16, BF16, FP8, INT4 | FP32, FP16, BF16, FP8, INT4 |
| Peak FP16/BF16 tensor TFLOPS | 989 TFLOPS | 181.05 TFLOPS |
| Peak FP8 tensor TFLOPS | 1,979 TFLOPS | 362 TFLOPS |
| NVLink / multi-GPU interconnect | NVLink 4, 900 GB/s bidirectional | – |
| Max board power (TDP) | Up to 700W (configurable) | 300W |
| Form factor | SXM5 | – |
| Regions | 7 | 2 |
On-demand price
| Rate | H100 | L40 |
|---|---|---|
| Lowest per GPU/hr | $2.78/GPU/hr | $0.850/GPU/hr |
Which is better for AI: H100 or L40?
Choose the H100 when 80 GB of VRAM is the gating requirement. Choose the L40 when 48 GB is enough for the workload and the lower hourly rate points that way.
H100 vs L40: common questions
Is the H100 or the L40 better for AI?
Short answer: choose the H100 when 80 GB of VRAM is the gating requirement. Choose the L40 when 48 GB is enough for the workload and the lower hourly rate points that way.
Is the H100 or the L40 cheaper to rent?
On Aquanode's live marketplace the H100 starts at $2.78/GPU/hr (median $3.70/GPU/hr) and the L40 starts at $0.850/GPU/hr (median $1.03/GPU/hr). The L40 is the cheaper of the two at the entry rate, by 69%.
What is the difference between the H100 and the L40?
The H100 has 80 GB of VRAM against the L40's 48 GB; the H100 is a Hopper part and the L40 is Ada Lovelace (compute capability 9.0 vs 8.9); both run BF16, FP8, INT4 workloads in hardware. On price, the H100 lists from $2.78/GPU/hr and the L40 from $0.850/GPU/hr.
How widely available are the H100 and the L40?
The H100 is listed in 7 regions and the L40 in 2 regions right now.
How much does 1,000 GPU-hours cost on the H100 vs the L40?
At the lowest rates listed today, 1,000 GPU-hours costs $2,778 on the H100 and $850 on the L40, a difference of $1,928 for the same runtime. Rates are per GPU per hour and update hourly.
How much VRAM does the H100 have compared to the L40?
The H100 has 80 GB of VRAM; the L40 has 48 GB.
Does the H100 or the L40 support NVLink?
The H100 supports NVLink 4, 900 GB/s bidirectional; the L40 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 H100 page and L40 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 H100 VRAM calculator and the L40 VRAM calculator, see vendor-published throughput in the GPU benchmarks and specs table, or browse every model by generation in the GPU index.
More H100 comparisons
More L40 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.
