L40 vs L40S: cloud rental cost compared
Short answer: pick the L40S when you're running an AI/ML workload (inference, fine-tuning), which is what the L40S is positioned and typically priced for. Pick the L40 when you're doing graphics, rendering or a mixed workload where the L40 is available cheaper.
You can rent both by the hour, no purchase required. L40 from $0.690/GPU/hr across 3 providers; L40S from $0.790/GPU/hr across 5 providers. The L40 is 13% cheaper at the entry rate.
Specs side by side
Price by provider
Which should you pick: L40 or L40S?
The two share identical memory specs, both listing 48GB GDDR6 at 864 GB/s on NVIDIA's own product pages (Aug 2026), so this isn't a memory decision at all; the L40S is NVIDIA's data-center/AI-positioned variant of the same silicon, while the L40 is positioned for graphics/rendering workloads. Pick the L40S when you're running an AI/ML workload (inference, fine-tuning), which is what the L40S is positioned and typically priced for; pick the L40 when you're doing graphics, rendering or a mixed workload where the L40 is available cheaper. On price the L40 undercuts the L40S by 13% at the entry rate ($0.690 vs $0.790/GPU/hr). Worth weighing if the deciding factor above isn't a hard requirement for your job.
Decision criteria
Pick the L40 when
- You're doing graphics, rendering or visualization work
- L40 pricing is meaningfully cheaper in your region
- You have a mixed graphics+compute workload matching the L40's positioning
Pick the L40S when
- You're running inference or fine-tuning, an AI/ML-first workload
- You want the SKU NVIDIA specifically positions for data-center AI
- L40S has better availability where you're deploying
Price-performance
At list rates, 1,000 GPU-hours costs $690 on the L40 against $790 on the L40S. 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.
L40 vs L40S: common questions
Is the L40 or the L40S cheaper to rent?
On Aquanode's live marketplace the L40 starts at $0.690/GPU/hr (median $0.820/GPU/hr across 3 providers) and the L40S starts at $0.790/GPU/hr (median $1.09/GPU/hr across 5 providers). The L40 is the cheaper of the two at the entry rate, by 13%.
What is the difference between the L40 and the L40S?
Both cards report 48 GB of VRAM; both are Ada Lovelace parts; both run BF16, FP8, INT4 workloads in hardware. On price, the L40 lists from $0.690/GPU/hr and the L40S from $0.790/GPU/hr.
Which cloud providers offer the L40 and the L40S?
3 providers list the L40 (RunPod, Massed Compute and HyperStack) and 5 list the L40S (RunPod, Vast.ai, Massed Compute, Verda and Nebius), across 3 and 5 regions respectively. Both are available from RunPod and Massed Compute.
How much does 1,000 GPU-hours cost on the L40 vs the L40S?
At the lowest rates listed today, 1,000 GPU-hours costs $690 on the L40 and $790 on the L40S, a difference of $100 for the same runtime. Rates are per GPU per hour and update hourly.
What's the actual difference between the L40 and L40S?
On paper, nothing on memory. Both report 48GB of GDDR6 at 864 GB/s on NVIDIA's own product pages. The difference is positioning: the L40S is NVIDIA's data-center/AI-workload SKU, while the L40 targets graphics and rendering. Pick based on your workload and whichever is cheaper in your region, not on a spec-sheet gap that doesn't exist.
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.
