Pricing
Below is a price snapshot for single A100 GPU rental rates (as of May 2026). All numbers are on-demand, pay-by-the-hour in a U.S. region unless noted.
*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)
<ul><li><strong>On-demand only:</strong> No reserved-instance, commitment, or prepaid discounts.</li><li><strong>Same class of silicon:</strong> All providers offer NVIDIA A100 GPUs; SKUs with 80 GB are higher.</li><li><strong>Public price lists:</strong> 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.</li><li><strong>USD in U.S. regions:</strong> Rates in other regions can differ by 5-20%.</li></ul>
Why this matters for developers
This chart compares how much it costs to run an NVIDIA A100 for 10 hours across major cloud providers.
Even small differences in hourly pricing quickly add up. A workload that costs $0.15 more per hour can translate into significantly higher monthly spend, especially for training jobs, batch processing, or production inference at scale.
Takeaways
<ul><li><strong>Thunder Compute is ~7× cheaper</strong> than GCP for a single A100 and still 1.5-4.4× cheaper than AWS, Lambda, Paperspace, and Azure.</li><li>Bookmark this page, we refresh the numbers monthly so you don't have to.</li></ul>
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.