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A100 Pricing (May 2025): Who is the Cheapest GPU Cloud?

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

Published:

Apr 16, 2025

Last updated:

Apr 27, 2025

Below is a price snapshot for single A100 GPU rental rates (as of May 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 40 GB	$0.57	On-demand, price varies for multi-GPU nodes
Runpod Community Cloud	A100 80 GB (40 N/A)	$1.19	Marketplace pricing, Secure Cloud is ~50% more expensive
Vast.ai	A100 SXM4	$1.27	Crowdsourced, frequent complaints about reliability
Lambda GPU Cloud	1 × A100 40 GB	$1.29	Flat rate per GPU
Paperspace	1 x A100 40 GB	$3.09	Lower prices available with 1-3 year commitments
Azure	ND96asr A100 v4 (8 × A100)	$3.40	$27.20/hr for 8 GPU box → ÷ 8 GPUs
AWS EC2	p4d.24xlarge (8 × A100)	$4.10	$32.77/hr for 8 GPU VM
Google Cloud	a2‑highgpu‑1g (1 × A100 40 GB)	$4.27	Listed workstation VM price

*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 40 GB cards; 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 × $0.57	$1.14
Lambda	2 × $1.29	$2.58
Paperspace	2 x $3.09	$6.18
Azure	2 × $3.40	$6.80
AWS	2 × $4.10	$8.20

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 AWS or 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.