NVIDIA A100
The NVIDIA A100 is the industry-standard GPU for AI workloads, offering excellent performance-to-cost ratio. Available in 40GB and 80GB variants, A100 delivers 312 TFLOPS for AI training with 3rd-generation Tensor Cores. Multi-Instance GPU (MIG) allows splitting one A100 into 7 smaller instances for efficient inference serving. Widely available across all major cloud providers at $1-2/hr. Powers production AI at thousands of companies. Used for: LLM fine-tuning (Llama, GPT-J), computer vision (object detection, segmentation), recommendation systems, and scientific computing. Sweet spot for most AI workloads where H100's extra cost isn't justified.
Overview
A100 is the most cost-effective GPU for most AI training and inference workloads. Fine-tune 7B models in 6 hours, train custom CNNs, run inference at 1000s of requests/second. Multi-Instance GPU (MIG) partitions one A100 into up to 7 isolated instances—perfect for serving multiple models or multi-tenant deployments. 40GB variant ($1.10/hr) suitable for most tasks, 80GB variant ($1.29/hr) for larger models. Available everywhere: AWS, GCP, Azure, Lambda Labs, vast.ai. Proven reliability with millions of GPU-hours in production.
Key Specifications
- **Memory**: 40GB or 80GB HBM2e, 1.6TB/s bandwidth
- **Compute**: 312 TFLOPS FP16 Tensor, 156 TFLOPS FP32
- **Multi-Instance GPU**: Split into 7 instances (MIG)
- **NVLink**: 600 GB/s for multi-GPU scaling
- **Power**: 400W (SXM4), 250W (PCIe)
- **Release**: 2020, mature and widely available
Business Value
A100 offers best price/performance for most AI workloads. Fine-tuning 7B models: $6 on A100 vs $30+ on H100 (when H100 overkill). Running inference: MIG enables serving 7 models on one GPU vs needing 7 separate GPUs. For businesses building AI products, A100 is the practical choice: mature ecosystem, broad availability, competitive pricing. Reserve H100 for large-scale pre-training; use A100 for fine-tuning, inference, and experimentation.
Where to Access
- **Lambda Labs**: $1.10/hr (40GB), $1.29/hr (80GB)
- **AWS EC2 P4**: $32/hr (8× A100 80GB)
- **Google Cloud A2**: $25/hr (8× A100 40GB)
- **Azure ND A100 v4**: Available globally
- **vast.ai**: Starting $0.80/hr (community cloud)
- **Purchase**: $10K-$15K per unit, readily available