The specs that matter

	A100 80 GB (SXM)	H100 80 GB (SXM)
Memory	80 GB HBM2e	80 GB HBM3
Memory bandwidth	about 2.0 TB/s	about 3.35 TB/s
FP8 (Transformer Engine)	no	yes
Lowest on-demand we found	$1.35 (PCIe), $1.60 (SXM)	$2.50 (PCIe), $3.20 (SXM)

Specs: NVIDIA A100, NVIDIA H100. Prices: Hyperstack, 26 October 2026.

Cost per job, not per hour

The H100 costs about twice as much per hour. It's cheaper per job whenever it finishes the job in less than half the time.

If the H100 is…	Cost of the job on H100 vs A100 (at $3.20 vs $1.60)
1.5× faster	33% more expensive
2× faster	the same
3× faster	33% cheaper

How much faster depends on the workload. Memory-bound LLM inference gains roughly in line with bandwidth (about 1.7×). Training that can use FP8 gains more. Benchmarks vary widely, so time a short run on both before a long job.

Which to choose

A100: budget fine-tuning, LoRA and QLoRA, inference that's not latency-critical, anything that fits in 80 GB and doesn't use FP8.
H100: large training runs, FP8 training and inference, multi-GPU jobs where NVLink speed matters, tight deadlines.

Price both with your hours in the job cost calculator.