Sofia Lindström writes that cloud GPU pricing has diverged sharply in 2026, with AWS offering the lowest single-H100 on-demand rate at $6.88/hr while Azure's eight-GPU node pushes per-GPU costs to $12.29/hr. Azure leads in spot discounts at roughly 80% and object storage at $0.0184/GB-month, but its GPU premium makes it the priciest option for accelerator-heavy workloads.
- Google Cloud enforces an eight-GPU on-demand minimum for H100s, forcing small teams to pay for six unused accelerators
- Specialist GPU clouds like RunPod price H100s at $2.89/hr, a 2.4x discount versus AWS's on-demand rate
- Secondary charges (storage, public IP, egress) add 25-40% on top of advertised VM rates across all three hyperscalers
- AWS P5 GPU quota approval requires written justification and takes 3-7 business days
- Google Cloud enforces an eight-GPU on-demand minimum for H100s, forcing small teams to pay for six unused accelerators
- Specialist GPU clouds like RunPod price H100s at $2.89/hr, a 2.4x discount versus AWS's on-demand rate
- Secondary charges (storage, public IP, egress) add 25-40% on top of advertised VM rates across all three hyperscalers
- AWS P5 GPU quota approval requires written justification and takes 3-7 business days
