COMPARE / A100 VS H100 SXM
A100 vs H100 SXM
Specs from the chip makers' datasheets; prices from the live Compute Cafe panel, refreshed daily. Every rate is an on-demand published price with a source receipt.
CHEAPEST A100
$1.090/hr
Thunder Compute · median $1.35 · 5 providers
CHEAPEST H100 SXM
$1.190/hr
IO.NET · median $11.06 · 56 providers
CHEAPER RIGHT NOW
A100
live panel, 2026-11-12
| A100 | H100 SXM | |
|---|---|---|
| MAKER | NVIDIA | NVIDIA |
| ARCHITECTURE | Ampere | Hopper |
| LAUNCHED | 2020 | 2022 |
| MEMORY | 40 or 80 GB HBM2/e | 80 GB HBM3 |
| MEMORY BANDWIDTH | 1.6-2.0 TB/s | 3.35 TB/s |
| TENSOR COMPUTE | 312 TFLOPS FP16/BF16 tensor dense (624 sparse) | 989 TFLOPS FP16/BF16 tensor dense (1,979 sparse); 1,979 TFLOPS FP8 dense |
| POWER DRAW | 250-400 W | 700 W |
| INTERCONNECT | NVLink 3.0 (SXM) or PCIe 4.0 | NVLink 4.0 900 GB/s |
HOW TO CHOOSE
A100 vs H100 SXM
Hopper is roughly 3x faster dense with FP8 support; A100 is roughly half the price. Both statements are on the panel - compare directly.
Workload fit
A100: fine-tuning, multi-gpu training, inference. H100 SXM: llm pre-training, 70b+ fine-tuning, high-throughput inference.
A100 VS H100 SXM - FAQ
Which is cheaper to rent, A100 or H100 SXM?
By today's published on-demand rates: A100 starts at $1.090/GPU/hr (median $1.35, 5 providers) and H100 SXM starts at $1.190/GPU/hr (median $11.06, 56 providers). The cheapest live listing is the A100 at Thunder Compute. Figures recompute from the panel on every refresh.
A100 or H100 SXM - which should I rent?
A100: The A100 is the most influential datacenter GPU of the decade: the chip GPT-class models were scaled on, and still the market's price-performance reference. H100 SXM: The H100 SXM is the chip the current generation of frontier models was trained on, and the benchmark every other datacenter GPU is priced against. The side-by-side spec table and live price rows above give the full picture.
Where can I rent A100 and H100 SXM?
5 providers publish A100 rates and 56 publish H100 SXM rates on Compute Cafe. Every row links to the provider's own published price - committed-use and reserved rates are excluded.
Full pricing: A100 · H100 SXM · all comparisons