COMPARE / A100 80GB VS L40S
A100 80GB vs L40S
Specs from the chip makers' datasheets; prices from the live Compute Cafe panel, refreshed hourly. Every rate is an on-demand published price with a source receipt.
CHEAPEST A100 80GB
$0.292/hr
AIC Cloud · median $1.60 · 36 providers
CHEAPEST L40S
$0.250/hr
SpotGPUs · median $1.39 · 48 providers
CHEAPER RIGHT NOW
L40S
live panel, 2026-09-27
| A100 80GB | L40S | |
|---|---|---|
| MAKER | NVIDIA | NVIDIA |
| ARCHITECTURE | Ampere | Ada Lovelace |
| LAUNCHED | 2020 | 2023 |
| MEMORY | 80 GB HBM2e | 48 GB GDDR6 ECC |
| MEMORY BANDWIDTH | 2.0 TB/s | 864 GB/s |
| TENSOR COMPUTE | 312 TFLOPS FP16/BF16 tensor dense (624 sparse) | 362 TFLOPS FP16/BF16 tensor dense (733 sparse); 733 TFLOPS FP8 dense |
| POWER DRAW | 250-400 W by form factor | 350 W |
| INTERCONNECT | NVLink 3.0 (SXM) or PCIe 4.0 | PCIe 4.0 x16 (no NVLink) |
HOW TO CHOOSE
L40S vs A100 80GB
L40S has more FP16 compute on paper, but GDDR6 bandwidth is less than half the A100's HBM2e and 48 GB caps model size. For 70B-class work the A100 wins; for smaller models the L40S is usually cheaper per token.
Workload fit
A100 80GB: fine-tuning, large-model inference, mig multi-tenant serving. L40S: llm inference up to ~34b, fine-tuning 7b-13b, image and video generation.
A100 80GB VS L40S - FAQ
Which is cheaper to rent, A100 80GB or L40S?
By today's published on-demand rates: A100 80GB starts at $0.292/GPU/hr (median $1.60, 36 providers) and L40S starts at $0.250/GPU/hr (median $1.39, 48 providers). The cheapest live listing is the L40S at SpotGPUs. Figures recompute from the panel on every refresh.
A100 80GB or L40S - which should I rent?
A100 80GB: The 80 GB A100 in either form factor is the market's reference point for large-model work: enough HBM to fine-tune 70B-class models, enough bandwidth to keep tensor cores fed, and a huge installed base that keeps hourly rates competitive. L40S: The L40S is the workhorse of the inference-and-fine-tuning middle: Ada tensor cores with FP8, 48 GB of memory, and a price well below the H100 line. The side-by-side spec table and live price rows above give the full picture.
Where can I rent A100 80GB and L40S?
36 providers publish A100 80GB rates and 48 publish L40S rates on Compute Cafe. Every row links to the provider's own published price - committed-use and reserved rates are excluded.
Full pricing: A100 80GB · L40S · all comparisons