A100 80GB vs V100
A100 80GB has 2.5× the memory; A100 80GB has 2.2× the bandwidth; V100 rents for 4.1× less.
The NVIDIA A100 80GB (Ampere, 2020) and the NVIDIA V100 (Volta, 2017) are 3 years and a silicon generation apart, which makes the price gap the heart of the story. On capacity, the A100 80GB carries 2.5x the memory (80 vs 32 GB), which sets what each can hold at all. On memory bandwidth, the number that governs LLM serving speed, the A100 80GB leads at 2 vs 0.9 TB/s. Raw compute favors the A100 80GB by 2.5x, which matters for training, prefill-heavy traffic, and diffusion work more than for chat-style decoding.
Price is where it settles: the V100 rents from $0.21/hr against $0.87/hr for the A100 80GB, a 4.1x gap that the performance numbers above only partly close. Per gigabyte of VRAM, the V100 is the cheaper rental, worth knowing if your model is capacity-bound rather than speed-bound. For why Ampere remains the value benchmark this comparison is priced against, see The A100 in 2026. Everything below is the underlying data.
NVIDIA · Ampere · 2020
NVIDIA A100 80GB
The GPU that started the LLM era, now a value pick for fine-tuning and mid-size inference.
From $0.87/hr at Vast.ai
NVIDIA · Volta · 2017
NVIDIA V100
The first Tensor Core GPU. Retired from the frontier, still cheap and capable for small models.
From $0.21/hr at Vast.ai
Head to head
■ A100 80GB ■ V100, bars share one scale across the whole catalog.
| A100 80GB | V100 | |
|---|---|---|
| Memory | 80 GB HBM2e | 32 GB HBM2 |
| Bandwidth | 2 TB/s | 0.9 TB/s |
| FP16 dense | 312 TF | 125 TF |
| FP8 dense | - | - |
| TDP | 400 W | 300 W |
| Interconnect | NVLink 3 · 600 GB/s | NVLink 2 · 300 GB/s |
| Cheapest rental | $0.87/hr | $0.21/hr |
| $/hr per GB VRAM | $1.1¢ | $0.7¢ |
What one can run that the other can't
Only on A100 80GB
- Llama 3.3 70B (4-bit)
- Qwen2.5 72B (4-bit)
- Mixtral 8x7B (8-bit)
Only on V100
Nothing, A100 80GB runs everything V100 does.
Rule of thumb: for LLM serving, prefer the GPU with more memory bandwidth per dollar; for training and prefill-heavy work, prefer FLOPS per dollar; and if the model doesn't fit in VRAM, none of the other numbers matter. Sanity-check with the VRAM calculator.