NVIDIA H100 80G LLM Cost
Monthly cost breakdown for running AI models on NVIDIA H100 80G — purchase vs rent, and how it compares to cloud APIs.
NVIDIA H100 80G Specifications
80GB
VRAM
$30,000
Purchase price
$3.2/hr
Cloud rental
700W
Power draw
Inference Speed on NVIDIA H100 80G
| Model Size | Tokens/sec | Fits in VRAM? |
|---|---|---|
| 7B model (4-bit quant) | ~350 tok/s | ✓ Yes |
| 13B model (4-bit quant) | ~200 tok/s | ✓ Yes |
| 70B model (4-bit quant) | ~90 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) | $1,250 | $10.08 | $1,260 |
| 12h/day (production) | $1,250 | $30.24 | $1,280 |
| 24h/day (full-time) | $1,250 | $60.48 | $1,310 |
Break-Even vs Cloud APIs
At what monthly cloud spend does NVIDIA H100 80G (purchased) become cost-effective? Assuming 12h/day usage.
OpenAI
GPT-4.1 Mini
1685M
tokens/month break-even
Anthropic
Claude Haiku 4.5
582M
tokens/month break-even
Groq
Llama 4 Scout (Groq)
7152M
tokens/month break-even
Rent NVIDIA H100 80G in the cloud
Get NVIDIA H100 80G access from $3.2/hr via RunPod. No hardware purchase required.