NVIDIA H100 Pricing (December 2025): Cheapest On-Demand Cloud GPU Rates
The table below compares current on-demand, hourly rental prices for a single NVIDIA H100 80GB GPU across major U.S. cloud providers. Prices are normalized per-GPU (even if only multi-GPU instances are offered) and reflect standard on-demand rates in U.S. regions (no spot, reserved, or non-US pricing).
| Provider | SKU/Instance | On‑Demand $/GPU‑hr* | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| AWS | p5.48xlarge (8 × H100 80GB) | ~$7.57 | 8‑GPU instance (p5.48xl) at ~$60.54/hr total. |
| Azure | NC H100 v5 VM (1 × H100 80GB) | $6.98 | Single H100 GPU VM in East US region. |
| Google Cloud | A3 High (a3‑highgpu‑1g, 1 × H100) | ~$11.06 | 1× H100 80GB in us‑central (on‑demand). |
| Oracle Cloud | BM.GPU.H100.8 (8 × H100 80GB) | ~$10.00 | 8‑GPU bare‑metal node; $80.00/hr |
| Lambda Labs | 8× NVIDIA H100 SXM (80GB) | $2.99 | 8‑GPU Lambda Cloud instance on HGX system. |
| CoreWeave | 8× H100 HGX (80GB, InfiniBand) | ~$6.16 | 8‑GPU HPC node w/ InfiniBand, $49.24/hr total. |
| Paperspace | H100 80GB (Dedicated instance) | $5.95 | On‑demand price per H100; multi‑GPU discounts available. |
| RunPod | H100 80GB (PCIe) | $1.99 | Community cloud price (per GPU); Secure Cloud is $2.39/hr. |
| Vast.ai | H100 80GB (various hosts) | ~$1.87 | Marketplace lowest current price per H100 GPU. |
*Normalized December 2025 cost per single H100 GPU, even when only multi-GPU instances are offered by the provider.
Methodology (why you can trust these numbers)
- On-demand only: No reserved-instance, commitment, or prepaid discounts.
- Same class of silicon: All prices refer to NVIDIA H100 80GB GPUs. Thunder Compute’s A100 80GB rate is also shown to help developers evaluate cost-performance tradeoffs.
- Public price lists: Every figure comes from the provider’s current pricing page (or public documentation) on the date above; where a provider sells only 8-GPU nodes we divide by eight to get a single-GPU equivalent.
- USD in U.S. regions: Rates elsewhere can differ by 5-20 %.
A100 cost-performance benchmark
| Provider | SKU/Instance | On‑Demand $/GPU‑hr* | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Thunder Compute (A100) | A100 80GB** | $0.78 | Not an H100; shown for cost‑performance comparison |
**Thunder Compute’s A100 80GB rate is included for reference. While A100s are a generation older, they remain highly capable for many workloads and offer dramatically better cost-efficiency for prototyping, fine-tuning, and small-scale training.
Why this matters for developers
| Provider | 2 hrs runtime | Effective cost |
|---|---|---|
| Thunder Compute – A100 80 GB | 2 × $0.78 | $1.56 |
| Vast.ai | 2 × $1.87 | $3.74 |
| RunPod | 2 × $2.69 | $5.38 |
| Lambda Labs | 2 × $2.99 | $5.98 |
| Azure | 2 × $6.98 | $13.96 |
| Google Cloud | 2 × $11.06 | $22.12 |
| AWS | 2 × $7.54 | $15.14 |
| Oracle | 2 × $10.00 | $20.00 |
Price sources: Thunder Compute pricing page, Lambda Labs “GPU Cloud” grid, RunPod pricing, Vast.ai median market price, and the DataCrunch hyperscaler comparison for AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure. vast.ai
Result: Two hours on Thunder Compute’s A100 costs less than 15 minutes on AWS or GCP H100s—and the A100 still gives you roughly 15× more runtime per dollar than hyperscaler H100s.
Takeaways
- Thunder Compute’s A100 rate is 4–8× cheaper than AWS or GCP and ≈2× cheaper than Azure, while its A100 remains the absolute price-performance leader.
- Specialized providers like Vast.ai, RunPod, and Lambda have narrowed the gap, but they still charge 2–3× more than Thunder Compute for equivalent runtime.
- Unless your workload truly needs H100 features (Transformer Engine, higher bandwidth, etc.), the A100 often delivers the best ROI for prototyping, fine-tuning, and small-scale training.
- Bookmark this page—we refresh the numbers quarterly so you don’t have to.
- Building a startup? See our analysis of Startup-Friendly GPU Cloud Providers for credit offers, and spin up an A100 or H100 on Thunder Compute