How much does it cost to rent an H200? From $3.76 an hour, and when 141GB is worth it

Renting one H200 cost from $3.76 an hour on Nov 3, 2026, the cheapest on-demand H200 SXM on Vast.ai's marketplace (median $4.70 across just 4 offers, our 20:20 UTC read). Managed H200s were $3.99 on Hyperstack and $5.29 on Runpod Secure Cloud, and the enterprise clouds listed $5.40 (Nebius) and $6.31 per GPU (CoreWeave). The H200 NVL, the PCIe version with the same 141GB, went lower: from $1.87 on Vast and $3.79 on Runpod. The 141GB is worth paying for only when your model plus its context won't fit an 80GB H100, for example a 70B model at 8-bit with a 32K context. If it fits in 80GB, an H100 does the same job for less. For the price right now, see our live cloud-GPU compare page.

How much does it cost to rent an H200?

Between $3.76 and $6.31 an hour for one H200 SXM on-demand, on Nov 3, 2026. Here is every price we could source that day, cheapest first. GMI Cloud advertises its H200 "from $3.20/GPU-hour", but its pricing page doesn't say whether that is on-demand or reserved, so we don't count it as the on-demand floor.

Three things move these numbers. Supply is thin: Vast had only 4 rentable single H200 SXM offers at our read, and two days earlier, on Nov 1, its cheapest was $2.76 across 7 offers. The floor can be one host and gone within the hour. Interruptible capacity is cheaper but can be taken back: Nebius lists H200 preemptible from $0.79 a GPU-hour, and Vast's interruptible H200 SXM bids started at $3.42; Vast's docs say an interruptible instance "may be paused". Runpod's $3.59 Community Cloud H200 still appears in its page data, but Runpod's docs say Community Cloud is no longer accepting new hosts, and a new account sees Secure Cloud at $5.29.

H200 SXM or H200 NVL: which one are you renting?

Both have 141GB of HBM3e at 4.8TB/s, per NVIDIA's spec table. The difference is the package and power:

• H200 SXM: the server-board version, up to 700W, 3,958 FP8 TFLOPS (with sparsity), NVLink at 900GB/s. This is what Runpod's "H200", Hyperstack, Nebius and CoreWeave rent.
• H200 NVL: a dual-slot PCIe card, up to 600W, 3,341 FP8 TFLOPS (with sparsity), linked by a 2- or 4-way NVLink bridge.

So for fitting a model, the NVL gives you exactly the same 141GB, usually for less. You give up some compute and, in multi-GPU setups, the full SXM interconnect. If your job is "load a big model on one card and serve it", the NVL is the cheaper way to get the memory. Check the listing name before you rent: on Vast and Runpod both versions appear, and they are priced differently.

When is 141GB worth paying for?

When the model, its context (the KV cache) and a little overhead need more than 80GB. That is the whole test. Here is what our VRAM calculator estimates for some common cases, and which card they fit:

The pattern: long context and 8-bit 70B models are where the H200 earns its premium, along with big mixture-of-experts models squeezed to 3-bit. A 4-bit 70B or anything 32B and under fits an 80GB H100. Full 16-bit 70B weights alone come close to filling 141GB, so that is a two-GPU job on any card. Check your exact model and context in the VRAM calculator before you rent.

One H200 or two H100s?

If your model needs more than 80GB, the alternative is splitting it across two H100s. On Nov 3, 2026 one H200 was cheaper than two H100 SXMs everywhere we checked:

• Runpod Secure: one H200 $5.29 vs two H100 SXMs $7.98 ($3.99 each)
• Hyperstack: one H200 SXM $3.99 vs two H100 SXMs $6.40 ($3.20 each)
• Vast.ai (cheapest offers): one H200 SXM $3.76 vs two H100 SXMs $4.80 ($2.40 each)

One card also skips the work of splitting a model across GPUs, which not every tool handles well. That is the strongest case for the H200: not speed, but one card instead of two.

When should you rent an H100 instead?

Whenever your job fits in 80GB. The H200 is a Hopper chip like the H100, and NVIDIA's spec table gives the H200 SXM the same headline FP8 compute figure the H100 SXM carries. For a model that already fits, you would pay roughly $1.30 to $1.40 more an hour (Runpod, Vast's cheapest offers) for memory you don't use. Our cheapest H100 guide has every H100 price from the same day, and if you need even more memory per card, see H100 vs B200.

Is the H200 faster than the H100?

For serving many users, often yes; for one person chatting, not by much. NVIDIA's H200 page says it "boosts inference speed by up to 2X compared to H100 GPUs" and shows Llama 2 70B as "1.9X Faster". The footnote is the honest part: that test ran the H100 at batch size 8 and the H200 at batch size 32. The extra memory lets the H200 serve four times as many requests at once, which is where most of the gain comes from. If you are one user running one prompt at a time, expect the speedup to come mainly from the 1.4x memory bandwidth, not 1.9x.

What else adds to the bill?

Storage. On both Vast and Runpod it keeps billing after you stop the GPU. Vast's docs say: "Storage charges continue even when instances are stopped. Delete instances completely to cease storage billing." Runpod's docs list volume disk at $0.10/GB/month while running and $0.20/GB/month while stopped. A 70B model at 8-bit is about 75GB of files before your datasets, so delete what you don't need when you're done, or keep it on a network volume ($0.07/GB/month for the first 1TB on Runpod).

Should you rent or buy an H200?

For a project measured in hours or weeks, rent. Buying only starts to make sense when the cards run all day, every day. In September a r/LocalLLaMA user posted their team's rent-or-buy working for an 8-GPU HGX H200 server, which they put at $320,000 to $420,000, against a median on-demand rate of about $4.40 per GPU-hour across the providers they compared. Replies pointed at the costs a quick spreadsheet leaves out: power and the interest on the money. Our rent vs buy guide walks through the same maths for smaller cards.

The H200 is a memory purchase: rent it when 80GB isn't enough, take the NVL if you only need the 141GB, and save with an H100 when your job fits. Compare live prices on our cloud-GPU compare page, check your model in the VRAM calculator, and see the cloud-GPU pricing pillar, the cheapest H100 and H100 vs B200.