COMPARE / L20 VS L40S
L20 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 L20
$0.575/hr
AutoDL · median $2.56 · 3 providers
CHEAPEST L40S
$0.250/hr
SpotGPUs · median $1.39 · 48 providers
CHEAPER RIGHT NOW
L40S
live panel, 2026-09-27
| L20 | L40S | |
|---|---|---|
| MAKER | NVIDIA | NVIDIA |
| ARCHITECTURE | Ada Lovelace | Ada Lovelace |
| LAUNCHED | 2024 | 2023 |
| MEMORY | 48 GB GDDR6 ECC | 48 GB GDDR6 ECC |
| MEMORY BANDWIDTH | 864 GB/s | 864 GB/s |
| TENSOR COMPUTE | Ada Lovelace datacenter card, third-gen Tensor Cores (export-compliant compute tier) | 362 TFLOPS FP16/BF16 tensor dense (733 sparse); 733 TFLOPS FP8 dense |
| POWER DRAW | 300 W | 350 W |
| INTERCONNECT | PCIe 4.0 x16, FHFL dual-slot, passive | PCIe 4.0 x16 (no NVLink) |
HOW TO CHOOSE
L20 vs L40S
Same 48 GB GDDR6 at 864 GB/s, same Ada generation - but the L40S carries full unrestricted compute. For inference the L20 is close; for anything training-adjacent the L40S is in a different league. The panel price gap tells you how the market values the cap.
Workload fit
L20: llm inference, vision and media ai, training. L40S: llm inference up to ~34b, fine-tuning 7b-13b, image and video generation.
L20 VS L40S - FAQ
Which is cheaper to rent, L20 or L40S?
By today's published on-demand rates: L20 starts at $0.575/GPU/hr (median $2.56, 3 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.
L20 or L40S - which should I rent?
L20: The L20 is the China-market companion to the H20: a 48 GB Ada datacenter card with the L40S's memory system (48 GB, 864 GB/s) but export-compliant compute, sold only in China, Hong Kong, and Macau. 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 L20 and L40S?
3 providers publish L20 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: L20 · L40S · all comparisons