COMPARE / A40 VS L40S
A40 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 A40
$0.090/hr
SpotGPUs · median $0.65 · 14 providers
CHEAPEST L40S
$0.250/hr
SpotGPUs · median $1.39 · 48 providers
CHEAPER RIGHT NOW
A40
live panel, 2026-09-27
| A40 | L40S | |
|---|---|---|
| MAKER | NVIDIA | NVIDIA |
| ARCHITECTURE | Ampere | Ada Lovelace |
| LAUNCHED | 2020 | 2023 |
| MEMORY | 48 GB GDDR6 | 48 GB GDDR6 ECC |
| MEMORY BANDWIDTH | 696 GB/s | 864 GB/s |
| TENSOR COMPUTE | 150 TFLOPS FP16 tensor dense (300 sparse) | 362 TFLOPS FP16/BF16 tensor dense (733 sparse); 733 TFLOPS FP8 dense |
| POWER DRAW | 300 W | 350 W |
| INTERCONNECT | PCIe 4.0 x16 (NVLink bridge on pairs) | PCIe 4.0 x16 (no NVLink) |
HOW TO CHOOSE
A40 vs L40S
The L40S has 2.4x the tensor compute and FP8. The A40 only wins when the panel prices it well below - check the spread.
Workload fit
A40: mid-size inference, rendering and vdi. L40S: llm inference up to ~34b, fine-tuning 7b-13b, image and video generation.
A40 VS L40S - FAQ
Which is cheaper to rent, A40 or L40S?
By today's published on-demand rates: A40 starts at $0.090/GPU/hr (median $0.65, 14 providers) and L40S starts at $0.250/GPU/hr (median $1.39, 48 providers). The cheapest live listing is the A40 at SpotGPUs. Figures recompute from the panel on every refresh.
A40 or L40S - which should I rent?
A40: The A40 is Ampere's big-memory visualization card: 48 GB of GDDR6, RT cores, and vGPU support. 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 A40 and L40S?
14 providers publish A40 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: A40 · L40S · all comparisons