NVIDIA A100 80G LLM Cost
Monthly cost breakdown for running AI models on NVIDIA A100 80G — purchase vs rent, and how it compares to cloud APIs.
NVIDIA A100 80G Specifications
80GB
VRAM
$15,000
Purchase price
$2.21/hr
Cloud rental
400W
Power draw
Inference Speed on NVIDIA A100 80G
| Model Size | Tokens/sec | Fits in VRAM? |
|---|---|---|
| 7B model (4-bit quant) | ~180 tok/s | ✓ Yes |
| 13B model (4-bit quant) | ~100 tok/s | ✓ Yes |
| 70B model (4-bit quant) | ~45 tok/s | ✓ Yes |
Monthly Cost by Daily Usage (Purchase Mode)
Amortized over 24 months, $0.12/kWh electricity
| Daily Usage | GPU Amortization | Electricity | Total/mo |
|---|---|---|---|
| 4h/day (part-time) | $625 | $5.76 | $631 |
| 12h/day (production) | $625 | $17.28 | $642 |
| 24h/day (full-time) | $625 | $34.56 | $660 |
Break-Even vs Cloud APIs
At what monthly cloud spend does NVIDIA A100 80G (purchased) become cost-effective? Assuming 12h/day usage.
OpenAI
GPT-4.1 Mini
845M
tokens/month break-even
Anthropic
Claude Haiku 4.5
292M
tokens/month break-even
Groq
Llama 4 Scout (Groq)
3588M
tokens/month break-even
Rent NVIDIA A100 80G in the cloud
Get NVIDIA A100 80G access from $2.21/hr via Lambda Labs. No hardware purchase required.