COMPARE / H100 PCIE VS L40S
H100 PCIe 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 H100 PCIE
$0.690/hr
SpotGPUs · median $2.73 · 13 providers
CHEAPEST L40S
$0.250/hr
SpotGPUs · median $1.39 · 48 providers
CHEAPER RIGHT NOW
L40S
live panel, 2026-09-27
| H100 PCIE | L40S | |
|---|---|---|
| MAKER | NVIDIA | NVIDIA |
| ARCHITECTURE | Hopper | Ada Lovelace |
| LAUNCHED | 2022 | 2023 |
| MEMORY | 80 GB HBM2e | 48 GB GDDR6 ECC |
| MEMORY BANDWIDTH | 2.0 TB/s | 864 GB/s |
| TENSOR COMPUTE | 756 TFLOPS FP16/BF16 tensor dense (1,513 sparse); 1,513 TFLOPS FP8 dense | 362 TFLOPS FP16/BF16 tensor dense (733 sparse); 733 TFLOPS FP8 dense |
| POWER DRAW | 350 W | 350 W |
| INTERCONNECT | PCIe 5.0 x16 (NVLink bridge up to 600 GB/s) | PCIe 4.0 x16 (no NVLink) |
HOW TO CHOOSE
L40S vs H100 PCIe
H100 PCIe adds HBM bandwidth, FP8 maturity and 80 GB - at 2-4x the hourly rate. L40S owns the middle market.
Workload fit
H100 PCIe: inference, fine-tuning. L40S: llm inference up to ~34b, fine-tuning 7b-13b, image and video generation.
H100 PCIE VS L40S - FAQ
Which is cheaper to rent, H100 PCIe or L40S?
By today's published on-demand rates: H100 PCIe starts at $0.690/GPU/hr (median $2.73, 13 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.
H100 PCIe or L40S - which should I rent?
H100 PCIe: The H100 PCIe puts Hopper's Transformer Engine into standard servers at half the SXM power budget. 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 H100 PCIe and L40S?
13 providers publish H100 PCIe 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: H100 PCIe · L40S · all comparisons