A100 GPU Cloud Rental Guide 2026: Best Prices & Providers
Everything you need to know about renting NVIDIA A100 GPUs in the cloud. Compare 40GB vs 80GB variants, cost benchmarks, and top providers for 2026.
The NVIDIA A100 remains the industry's workhorse in 2026. While the H100 and B100 grab the headlines, the A100 offers a level of cost-efficiency and availability that makes it the smarter choice for most medium-scale AI projects. This guide covers how to rent it effectively.
40GB vs. 80GB: Which A100 do you need?
The A100 comes in two main memory tiers. Choosing the wrong one can lead to "Out of Memory" errors or wasted budget.
| Feature | A100 40GB | A100 80GB |
|---|---|---|
| Memory Type | HBM2e | HBM2e |
| Bandwidth | 1.6 TB/s | 2.0 TB/s |
| Best For | 7B-13B model fine-tuning | 30B-70B model inference |
| Avg. Price | $0.80 - $1.10/hr | $1.20 - $1.60/hr |
Top Providers for A100 Rental in 2026
1. Lambda Labs — The Reliability King
Lambda is known for its high-quality data centers and excellent uptime. They offer "bare metal" A100s which provide consistent performance without the virtualization overhead found in AWS or Azure.
2. RunPod — The Flexibility Leader
RunPod's "Secure Cloud" offers A100s at very competitive rates. They are particularly good for those who need to launch instances quickly with pre-installed PyTorch or Jupyter environments.
3. CoreWeave — The Scaling Specialist
If you need a cluster of 8x or 16x A200s with fast NVLink interconnects, CoreWeave is often the best choice for training from scratch.
Cost Optimization Tip: Spot vs. On-Demand
If your training code supports periodic checkpointing (saving your progress), you can use Spot Instances. In 2026, A100 80GB spot instances can be found as low as $0.60/hr on marketplaces like Vast.ai, representing a 60% saving over on-demand prices.
Training Performance Benchmark
How does the A100 stack up against the newer H100 in terms of total training cost?
- A100 80GB: 65 mins per epoch costs ~$1.30.
- H100 80GB: 38 mins per epoch costs ~$1.58.
For long training runs where time is less critical than cash flow, the A100 often results in 15-20% total budget savings.
Common Pitfalls when Renting A100s
- Egress Fees: Some providers (like AWS) charge heavily for moving data out of their cloud. If you are generating millions of images, check the egress policy.
- Disk Speed: An A100 is fast, but if your data is on slow HDD storage, the GPU will sit idle waiting for files. Use NVMe-attached storage.
- PCIe vs NVLink: For multi-GPU tasks, ensure the provider offers NVLink. Standard PCIe is too slow for efficient multi-GPU training.
Conclusion
In 2026, the A100 is far from obsolete. It is the "value king" for fine-tuning models under 70B parameters and for high-throughput inference service. Use our live comparison tool to find the specific provider that fits your regional and budget requirements.