Market insights

NVIDIA A100 Pricing (September 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 September 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)

  1. On‑demand only: No reserved‑instance, commitment, or prepaid discounts.
  2. Same class of silicon: All providers offer NVIDIA A100 GPUs; SKUs with 80 GB are higher.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.

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