Where can you rent an H100 cheapest? From $1.79 an hour, and the catch in each price

The cheapest H100 you could rent on Nov 3, 2026 was $1.79 an hour, on-demand, on Vast.ai's marketplace (median $2.40 across 6 offers, our 12:20 UTC read). The cheapest managed H100s were Hyperstack at $2.50 (listed simply as "H100") and Runpod Secure Cloud at $2.89 for an H100 PCIe. The catch: Vast's floor is one host out of a handful and can be gone in an hour, the even cheaper interruptible H100s can be paused or taken back mid-job, and on both Vast and Runpod the storage keeps billing after you stop the instance. Lambda, Nebius and CoreWeave listed $3.29 to $6.16 for the same chip that day. For the price right now, see our live cloud-GPU compare page.

Where is the cheapest H100 to rent right now?

On a marketplace. Vast.ai lets independent hosts list their GPUs, and on Nov 3, 2026 its cheapest on-demand H100 SXM was $1.79 an hour. Every other price below is the provider's own published rate, read the same day; the Vast, Novita and Runpod figures are from our hourly read of their APIs, the same data that feeds /cloud-gpu.

A reliable on-demand H100 from a managed provider cost about $2.50 to $3 an hour on Nov 3, 2026. Anything well above that buys enterprise capacity, multi-GPU nodes and contracts, not a faster chip. If you need 8 GPUs with fast interconnect for a training run, that premium can be worth it; for one card for a few hours, it isn't.

Why is Runpod's H100 sometimes $1.99?

That's the Community Cloud price. Runpod's pricing page lists H100 PCIe at $1.99 on Community Cloud and $2.89 on Secure Cloud (SXM: $2.69 vs $3.99) in its structured data, read Nov 3, 2026. Its docs say "Runpod is no longer accepting new hosts for Community Cloud" and "Existing Community Cloud resources remain available", so the cheap tier is shrinking. Expect to pay the Secure Cloud price.

What is the catch with the cheapest H100s?

There are three, and they apply to the cheapest offers most.

1. Thin supply. Our Nov 3 read found only 6 rentable on-demand H100 SXM offers on Vast. The $1.79 one is a single host; once it's rented, the next price up is what you pay. That's why we show the median ($2.40) next to the floor. Check the host's reliability score before you rent.

2. Interruptible means it can stop. Vast's interruptible H100s started at $0.89 an hour on Nov 3 (median $2.40), and Nebius lists preemptible H100s "from $0.79" with a note that "Spot prices are dynamic and may increase or decrease based on available capacity". Vast's own docs say an interruptible instance "May be paused if outbid or if on-demand requested". The data stays, but the job stops until your bid wins again.

3. Storage bills after you stop. Vast's pricing docs say: "Storage charges continue even when instances are stopped. Delete instances completely to cease storage billing." Runpod's storage docs list volume disk at $0.10 per GB a month while running and $0.20 per GB a month while stopped. A stopped Runpod pod with a 100 GB volume disk is about $20 a month for nothing, by our arithmetic.

Should you rent an interruptible or an on-demand H100?

Interruptible if the job can restart, on-demand if it can't. Inference, testing a model, or a fine-tune that saves checkpoints every few minutes are fine on an interruptible card; Vast's own advice is to save work often and checkpoint. A long training run, a demo you're showing live, or anything you'd hate to lose belongs on an on-demand instance: Hyperstack at $2.50 or Runpod Secure at $2.89 were the cheapest managed options on Nov 3, 2026, with Vast's on-demand marketplace offers below them if you pick a reliable host.

Hyperstack also lists a reserved H100 from $1.75 an hour and a spot H100 PCIe at $2.00 on its pricing page (read Nov 3, 2026). Reservation means committing up front, so it only pays off if you'll keep the card busy.

Why is CoreWeave's H100 three times Vast's?

They're selling different things. CoreWeave lists an 8-GPU HGX H100 node at $49.24 an hour (about $6.16 per GPU, read Nov 3, 2026); Nebius lists $4.50 per GPU-hour for its HGX H100. Those are data center nodes with fast GPU-to-GPU links, sold to teams that need many GPUs at once and contracted capacity. Vast is a marketplace of independent hosts with variable reliability. The chip is the same H100.

For a small team weighing a long multi-node run, a thread on r/mlops about renting 10 H100 nodes is a useful read: the worries there are support response times when a node fails mid-training and invoices that come out higher than the sticker price, not the hourly rate.

What does an H100 cost per job?

An hour only matters next to what you finish in it. An H100's 80GB runs a 70B model quantized, or a smaller model at high throughput. Using the Nov 3, 2026 prices:

• Four hours of 70B inference: about $7.16 at Vast's $1.79 floor, $11.56 on Runpod Secure PCIe at $2.89.
• A two-hour QLoRA fine-tune of an 8B model: about $3.58 to $5.78 at the same two rates. See the best cloud GPU for fine-tuning.
• A box left running overnight by mistake (10 hours): $17.90 to $28.90. Shut it down, and delete it when you're done.

That's our arithmetic, not a quote; the real bill depends on how long the card sits idle. Not sure you need 80GB? Our VRAM calculator shows whether a cheaper 24GB or 48GB card fits your model, and /cost-to-run matches a model to the cheapest card that runs it.

If you don't specifically need an H100, see the cheapest cloud GPU overall, what an H200 costs to rent, H100 vs B200 rental cost, the full cloud-GPU pricing guide, or the rent-vs-buy math before you buy hardware.