Market insights
NVIDIA A100 Pricing (December 2025): Cheapest On-demand GPU Instances
September 16, 2025
5 mins read
Pricing
Below is a price snapshot for single A100 GPU rental rates (as of December 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.