price of compute

NVIDIA L40 rental price

Median $0.82/GPU-hr on-demand · $0.63/GPU-hr spot · across 5 providers · Updated 2026-08-11 03:29 UTC · Anatomy ↓

Price history

$0.00$0.25$0.50$0.75$1.00Aug 9Aug 10Aug 11$0.82$0.69$0.63

Each point is the daily cross-provider median for this SKU and pricing type (per-provider medians first, so no marketplace’s volume dominates). Gaps are gaps — we don’t interpolate missing data.

The spread: the same NVIDIA L40 ranges from $0.35 to $1.35 per hour across tracked providers right now — a 3.9× difference. This is why we exist.

Where to rent it

ProviderTypeRegion$/GPU-hrSeen
Thunder ComputeThunder ComputeOn-demand—$0.352026-08-11 03:29 UTC
Vast.aiVast.aiOn-demandPL$0.452026-08-11 03:29 UTC
Vast.aiVast.aiSpotFI$0.472026-08-11 03:29 UTC
RunPodRunPodCommunity—$0.692026-08-11 03:29 UTC
CoreWeaveCoreWeaveSpot—$0.782026-08-11 03:29 UTC
RunPodRunPodOn-demand—$0.822026-08-11 03:29 UTC
CoreWeaveCoreWeaveOn-demand—$1.252026-08-11 03:29 UTC
HyperstackHyperstackOn-demand—$1.352026-08-11 03:29 UTC

Prices are as listed by providers at scrape time; availability at a listed price isn’t guaranteed. Links marked ↗ may be affiliate links — they never affect prices shown or ordering.

Anatomy: why it costs this

Everything that has to exist before one L40-hour can be rented — then the arithmetic on the parts that can be priced honestly.

The foundry. Nearly every datacenter GPU is fabbed here — the tightest bottleneck in the chain.TSMC4N (AD102) process · packagingThe memory feeding this SKU — for HBM parts, the second great bottleneck.Micron · SamsungGDDR6 ECC · 48 GBDesign and the software moat — and most of the margin in the whole chain.NVIDIAGPU design & softwareHow this silicon becomes a rentable machine.Supermicro · Dell · Foxco…HGX/DGX & OEM serversFleets are financed; capital recovery is the largest slice of the hourly price.Capital marketsdebt & equityColo and hyperscale facilities; PUE lives here.Data centersland · shell · coolingGrid electricity including cooling overhead (PUE) — priced on the cost stack below.Power gridkWh per GPU-hourEvaporative-cooling upper bound — environmentally real, economically small.Waterliters per GPU-hourThe providers listing this SKU right now — the layer this site prices hourly.Clouds & marketplacesThunder Compute · Vast.ai · R…The number this site tracks.You$0.82/GPU-hr median
Electricity$0.04/hr4.9%0.46 kWh from the grid
Water (upper bound)$0.003/hr0.3%≤ 0.5 L, priced high on purpose
Capital · facility · network · staff · margin$0.78/hr94.8%everything the operating inputs don't explain

Power basis: vendor GPU TDP only — full-server draw runs meaningfully higher × PUE 1.54 × 8.71¢/kWh (0.46 kWh from the grid). Water bounded at 1.8 L/kWh and $5/m³ — deliberately high. The residual is hardware amortization, facility, staff, and margin — presented as a residual because vendors don’t publish server street prices, and we don’t print numbers we can’t stand behind.

Verified inputs & sources
Price alert

One email when the NVIDIA L40 daily median hits your number. No account, one-shot, the alert retires after it fires.

NVIDIA L40 and NVIDIA L40S are tracked as separate SKUs — different interconnect, different performance, different market. Comparing them in one number would be wrong, so we don’t.

Last scrape: 2026-08-11 03:30 UTC · 1308 observations today across 16 providers · Failures logged, never interpolated.

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