H100 vs L40S: cloud rental cost compared
You can rent both by the hour, no purchase required. H100 from $2.52/GPU/hr across 5 providers; L40S from $0.790/GPU/hr across 3 providers. The L40S is 69% cheaper at the entry rate.
Specs side by side
Price by provider
H100 vs L40S: common questions
Is the H100 or the L40S cheaper to rent?
On Aquanode's live marketplace the H100 starts at $2.52/GPU/hr (median $3.29/GPU/hr across 5 providers) and the L40S starts at $0.790/GPU/hr (median $0.990/GPU/hr across 3 providers). The L40S is the cheaper of the two at the entry rate, by 69%.
What is the difference between the H100 and the L40S?
The H100 has 80 GB of VRAM against the L40S's 48 GB; the H100 is a Hopper part and the L40S is Ada Lovelace (compute capability 9.0 vs 8.9); both run BF16, FP8, INT4 workloads in hardware. On price, the H100 lists from $2.52/GPU/hr and the L40S from $0.790/GPU/hr.
Which cloud providers offer the H100 and the L40S?
5 providers list the H100 (HyperStack, RunPod, Vast.ai, Akash and DataCrunch) and 3 list the L40S (RunPod, Vast.ai and Massed Compute), across 5 and 3 regions respectively. Both are available from RunPod and Vast.ai.
How much does 1,000 GPU-hours cost on the H100 vs the L40S?
At the lowest rates listed today, 1,000 GPU-hours costs $2,525 on the H100 and $790 on the L40S — a difference of $1,735 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.
