Technical insights

NVIDIA H100 Pricing (January 2026): Cheapest On-Demand Cloud GPU Rates

September 16, 2025
8 mins read

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
Thunder Compute H100 80GB (On-Demand) $1.89 On-demand H100 pricing at low cost with strong reliability
AWS p5.48xlarge (8 × H100) ~$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. Reliability varies.

*Normalized January 2026 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 H100 rate is 4–8× cheaper than AWS or GCP and ≈2× cheaper than Azure
  • 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.
  • 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 H100 on Thunder Compute

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