price of compute

NVIDIA A100 40GB SXM rental price

Median $1.45/GPU-hr on-demand · $0.65/GPU-hr spot · across 5 providers · Updated 2026-08-11 04:38 UTC · Anatomy ↓

Price history

$0.00$0.50$1.00$1.50$2.00Dec 3May 13Jan 1Apr 7Aug 2live pipeline →$1.45$1.00$0.65

Each point is the daily cross-provider median for this SKU and pricing type (per-provider medians first, so no marketplace’s volume dominates). Gaps are gaps — we don’t interpolate missing data.

Dashed/hollow points before 2026-08-09: archival reconstruction from dated provider pricing-page snapshots (see methodology) — fewer providers, monthly resolution.

The spread: the same NVIDIA A100 40GB SXM ranges from $0.83 to $3.40 per hour across tracked providers right now — a 4.1× difference. This is why we exist.

Where to rent it

ProviderTypeRegion$/GPU-hrSeen
Vast.aiVast.aiSpotCZ$0.402026-08-11 03:29 UTC
DataCrunchDataCrunchSpot—$0.652026-08-11 04:38 UTC
AzureAzureSpoteastus$0.752026-08-11 04:38 UTC
Vast.aiVast.aiOn-demandDE$0.832026-08-11 03:29 UTC
RunPodRunPodCommunity—$1.002026-08-11 04:38 UTC
DataCrunchDataCrunchOn-demand—$1.292026-08-11 04:38 UTC
DenvrDenvrOn-demand—$1.452026-08-11 04:38 UTC
LambdaLambdaOn-demand—$1.992026-08-11 04:38 UTC
AzureAzureOn-demandeastus$3.402026-08-11 04:38 UTC

Prices are as listed by providers at scrape time; availability at a listed price isn’t guaranteed. Links marked ↗ may be affiliate links — they never affect prices shown or ordering.

Anatomy: why it costs this

Everything that has to exist before one A100 40GB SXM-hour can be rented — then the arithmetic on the parts that can be priced honestly.

The foundry. Nearly every datacenter GPU is fabbed here — the tightest bottleneck in the chain.TSMC7N process · packagingThe memory feeding this SKU — for HBM parts, the second great bottleneck.SK hynix · SamsungHBM2 · 40 GBDesign and the software moat — and most of the margin in the whole chain.NVIDIAGPU design & softwareHow this silicon becomes a rentable machine.Supermicro · Dell · Foxco…HGX/DGX & OEM serversFleets are financed; capital recovery is the largest slice of the hourly price.Capital marketsdebt & equityColo and hyperscale facilities; PUE lives here.Data centersland · shell · coolingGrid electricity including cooling overhead (PUE) — priced on the cost stack below.Power gridkWh per GPU-hourEvaporative-cooling upper bound — environmentally real, economically small.Waterliters per GPU-hourThe providers listing this SKU right now — the layer this site prices hourly.Clouds & marketplacesVast.ai · DataCrunch · Denvr …The number this site tracks.You$1.45/GPU-hr median
Electricity$0.11/hr7.5%1.25 kWh from the grid
Water (upper bound)$0.007/hr0.5%≤ 1.5 L, priced high on purpose
Capital · facility · network · staff · margin$1.33/hr92.0%everything the operating inputs don't explain

Power basis: published full-system wall power (DGX A100: 6.5 kW ÷ 8) × PUE 1.54 × 8.71¢/kWh (1.25 kWh from the grid). Water bounded at 1.8 L/kWh and $5/m³ — deliberately high. The residual is hardware amortization, facility, staff, and margin — presented as a residual because vendors don’t publish server street prices, and we don’t print numbers we can’t stand behind.

Verified inputs & sources
Price alert

One email when the NVIDIA A100 40GB SXM daily median hits your number. No account, one-shot, the alert retires after it fires.

NVIDIA A100 40GB SXM, NVIDIA A100 80GB SXM, and NVIDIA A100 40GB PCIe are tracked as separate SKUs — different interconnect, different performance, different market. Comparing them in one number would be wrong, so we don’t.

Last scrape: 2026-08-11 04:38 UTC · 1494 observations today across 16 providers · Failures logged, never interpolated.

Know what a GPU-hour costs before everyone else does.

One email a week: what moved, why, and where the spreads are. No sponsors choosing the content.

Free forever. Unsubscribe anytime.