How Much VRAM Do I Need for LLM Training and Inference?
A practical engineer's guide to VRAM for LLM training, fine-tuning, and inference. Learn how to estimate VRAM for 7B and 70B...
2026-10-25 Read guideGPU price index
A100 PCIe cloud rental prices
Every provider offering A100 PCIe, normalised to hourly on-demand pricing with VRAM and region details.
Research by GPUCloudCompare Research
40 GB VRAM
Ampere
1.55 TB/s
2 offers
About the A100 PCIe
- Memory
- 40 GB
- Architecture
- Ampere
- Memory bandwidth
- 1.55 TB/s
- Dense FP16 throughput
- 312 TFLOPS*
Vendor-published figures, with sparsity where the vendor states it. Always confirm on the official datasheet before sizing a cluster.
Live GPU price comparison
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| Provider | GPU model | VRAM | GPUs | vCPU | Region | On-demand /hr | Spot /hr | Actions |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vast.ai | A100 PCIe | 40 GB | 1 | — | Distributed (global hosts) | $0.4704 Best price | $0.4670 | Rent this GPU |
| RunPod | A100 PCIe | 80 GB | 1 | — | Global (secure + community cloud) | $1.1900 | — | Rent this GPU |
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Which GPUs work well with the A100 PCIe?
Use the LLM VRAM calculator to check whether a specific model fits in one A100 PCIe, and the cost estimator to turn a hourly rate into a monthly budget including storage and egress.
A100 PCIe compared with other GPUs
Frequently asked questions
Everything about renting cloud GPUs, affiliate tracking and how we collect pricing data.
Which GPUs are best for LLM inference?
For models that fit in memory, memory bandwidth matters more than raw FLOPS, so cards like the L40S, RTX 4090 or A100 often give better tokens per dollar than an H100. Once a model needs multi-GPU tensor parallelism, NVLink-equipped H100 or H200 instances usually win on throughput.
How much VRAM do I need to fine-tune a model?
Full fine-tuning needs roughly the parameter count times the bytes per parameter for weights, plus optimiser state which can be several times larger again. LoRA and QLoRA reduce the optimiser footprint dramatically. Use the LLM VRAM calculator to size a specific configuration.
Is it cheaper to rent or to buy a GPU?
Renting usually wins unless you can keep a device busy for a large fraction of the year. Cloud rental also shifts the cost of hardware refreshes onto the provider, which matters when new generations arrive every twelve to eighteen months.
Why do the same GPU models have different prices?
Configuration differs: number of GPUs per instance, system RAM and vCPU allocation, local disk, region, and whether the capacity is interruptible. We normalise to a single GPU so you can see through those differences.