What is the cheapest on-demand A100 GPU cloud provider in 2025?

Thunder Compute is the cheapest provider of on-demand A100 GPUs in 2025, offering A100 80GB GPUs at $0.78/hr.

Is Thunder Compute reliable?

Yes. Thunder Compute offers consistent, on-demand access to A100 GPUs in Tier 3&4 data centers. Thunder Compute operates with dedicated infrastructure to ensure reliability.

How does Thunder Compute compare to AWS, Azure, or GCP for short training jobs?

Thunder Compute is approximately 7× cheaper than AWS and Google Cloud for short GPU runtimes. For example, a 2-hour session costs $1.56 on Thunder Compute versus $8.20 on AWS. This makes it the most cost-effective choice for short jobs and experiments.

Why choose Thunder Compute over Lambda, RunPod, or Vast.ai?

Thunder Compute provides lower pricing, fully on-demand access, and has high reliability. They also provide a VS Code extension for one-click access to instances. At $0.78/hr for A100s, it is 2–3× cheaper than Lambda or RunPod’s secure tier.

Who should use Thunder Compute?

Thunder Compute is ideal for indie developers, researchers, and startups who need affordable and stable access to high-end GPUs for model training, experimentation, and inference.

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NVIDIA A100 Pricing (August 2025): Cheapest On-demand GPU Instances

What are the cheapest GPU clouds to rent NVIDIA A100s for deep learning?

Published:

Apr 16, 2025

Last updated:

Aug 13, 2025

Below is a price snapshot for single A100 GPU rental rates (as of August 2025). All numbers are on‑demand, pay‑by‑the‑hour in a U.S. region unless noted.

Provider	SKU / Instance	On-Demand $/GPU-hr*	Notes
Thunder Compute	A100 80 GB	$0.78	On-demand; multi-GPU nodes vary
Runpod Community Cloud	A100 80 GB (40 GB N/A)	$1.19	Marketplace; Secure Cloud ≈ 50 % higher
Vast.ai	A100 SXM4	$0.50-$3.00	Crowdsourced; reliability and pricing vary
Lambda GPU Cloud	1 × A100 40 GB	$1.29	Flat per-GPU rate
Paperspace	1 × A100 40 GB	$3.09	Lower with 1–3 yr commitments
Azure	ND96asr A100 v4 (8 × A100)	$3.40	$27.20/hr box → ÷ 8 GPUs
AWS EC2	p4d.24xlarge (8 × A100)	$3.02	$24.15/hr VM → ÷ 8 GPUs
Google Cloud	a2-highgpu-1g (1 × A100 40 GB)	$4.22	Vertex AI

*Per‑GPU costs for multi‑GPU nodes are averages for fair comparison; network, storage, and egress are not included.

Methodology (why you can trust these numbers)

On‑demand only: No reserved‑instance, commitment, or prepaid discounts.
Same class of silicon: All providers offer NVIDIA A100 GPUs; SKUs with 80 GB are higher.
Public price lists: Each figure comes from the vendor’s current pricing page on the date above; where a provider sells only 8‑GPU nodes we divided by eight to get a single‑GPU equivalent.
USD in U.S. regions: Rates in other regions can differ by 5‑20%.

Why this matters for developers

Provider	2 hrs runtime	Effective cost
Thunder Compute	2 × $0.78	$1.56
Lambda	2 × $1.29	$2.58
Paperspace	2 × $3.09	$6.18
Azure	2 × $3.40	$6.80
AWS	2 × $3.02	$6.04

Result: You get five to seven hours on a budget cloud GPU provider like Thunder Compute for the price of one on the big clouds.

Takeaways

Thunder Compute is ~7× cheaper than GCP for a single A100 and still 2‑3× cheaper than Lambda, RunPod, PaperSpace, Vast, or Azure.
Bookmark this page; we’ll refresh the numbers every quarter so you don’t have to.

If you work for a startup, check out our analysis of Startup-Friendly GPU Cloud Providers for an analysis that includes credit offers. Check out Thunder Compute for the cheapest A100s anywhere.

Carl Peterson

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NVIDIA A100 Pricing (August 2025): Cheapest On-demand GPU Instances

Methodology (why you can trust these numbers)

Why this matters for developers

Takeaways

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