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NVIDIA H100 Pricing (May 2025): Cheapest On-Demand Cloud GPU Rates
Comparison of single-GPU H100 hourly costs on AWS, Azure, GCP, Lambda Labs, RunPod, Vast.ai, and other U.S. providers.
Published:
May 19, 2025
Last updated:
May 19, 2025
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) | ~$12.29 | 8-GPU instance (p5.48xl) at ~$98.32/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) | ~$2.98 | 8-GPU bare-metal node; ~$2.98 per GPU on-demand. |
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) | ~$2.07 | Marketplace lowest current price per H100 GPU. |
*Normalized 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 80 GB cards. (Thunder Compute’s A100 80 GB rate is shown for context.)
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 %.
Why this matters for developers
Provider | 2 hrs runtime | Effective cost |
|---|---|---|
Thunder Compute – A100 80 GB | 2 × $0.78 | $1.56 |
Vast.ai | 2 × $2.07 | $4.14 |
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 × $12.29 | $24.58 |
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 own H100 costs less than 15 minutes on AWS or GCP—and the A100 still gives you roughly 15× more runtime per dollar than hyperscaler H100s.
Takeaways
Thunder Compute’s H100 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 to start hacking with $20 in free credit.
Carl Peterson
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