Market insights
Azure NC A100 vs Thunder Compute (September 2025): Pricing, Billing, and Flexibility
September 16, 2025
9 mins read
TL;DR
- Cost: Thunder Compute is ~4.7 × cheaper per GPU-hour.
- Billing: Thunder bills per second; Azure rounds up to whole minutes.
- Storage: Thunder persistent volumes start at $0.15/GB/mo; Azure Premium SSD is $0.18/GB/mo.
- Ease of use: One-click VS Code workspace, no quota tickets, swap CPU/RAM on the fly.
1. Raw GPU pricing
Azure Spot for the same SKU averages $1.145/hr (Vantage), but interruptions revoke your GPU with <30 s notice—unsuitable for fine-tuning runs that aren’t checkpoint-safe.
2. Hidden line items
¹Thunder matches Azure’s public egress rate only beyond the free tier.
3. Quotas and setup friction
- New Azure subscriptions start with 0 N-series vCPUs; you must file a GPU quota increase request.
- Availability is region-limited—East US 2 and West Europe frequently show capacity errors.
- Thunder Compute accounts spin up instantly with $10 free credit, no GPU quota tickets.
4. Developer experience
5. When is Azure still a fit?
- Multi-GPU scale (>8 A100s) in a single VM via NC96ads A100 v4.
- Co-locating with other Azure PaaS services for low-latency data pipelines.
For individual fine-tunes, model inference endpoints, and bursty hackathon workloads, Thunder Compute’s pay-as-you-go model wins on both price and friction.
Conclusion
If you need a single A100 80 GB quickly, Thunder Compute costs $289 less per 100 GPU-hours and bills down to the second. Unless you’re already locked into Azure’s ecosystem or require massive multi-GPU nodes, switching cuts spend and setup time.