A100 vs H100
3.2x the compute for 2.6x the used price; their resale prices are moving apart.
The difference
For new work, buy the H100. It has 3.2 times the A100’s dense BF16 compute, adds FP8, and has 1.7 times the memory bandwidth. The A100 is the cheaper asset: a used A100 80GB sold for a typical $5,400 in August 2026 against $14,250 for an H100 SXM.
Side by side
| Per GPU | A100 | H100 | H100 / A100 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Architecture, released | Ampere, 2020 | Hopper, Late 2022 | |
| Memory | 80 GB HBM2e | 80 GB HBM3 | 1.00x |
| Memory bandwidth | 2.0 TB/s | 3.35 TB/s | 1.68x |
| BF16, dense TFLOPS | 312 | 989 | 3.17x |
| FP8, dense TFLOPS | Not supported | 1,979 | |
| FP4, dense TFLOPS | Not supported | Not supported | |
| FP64 (Tensor / matrix), TFLOPS | 19.5 | 67 | 3.44x |
| Max power per GPU | 400 W | 700 W | 1.75x |
| Power per 8 GPUs | About 6.5 kW | About 10 kW | 1.54x |
| GPU-to-GPU link | NVLink 3, 600 GB/s per GPU | NVLink 4, 900 GB/s per GPU | |
| Scale-up domain | 8 GPUs (HGX board) | 8 GPUs (HGX board) | |
| Form factor, cooling | SXM4 module, 8-GPU HGX board; air | SXM5 module, 8-GPU HGX board; air | |
| Price per GPU, October 2026 | $5,400 (Used, typical realized sale) | $14,250 (Used, typical realized sale) | 2.64x |
| Launch price reported in the press | About $10,000 per chip (2023) | $25,000 to $40,000 per chip, analyst estimates (2024) | |
| Residual band, 2027 (conservative) | - | 11-19% of original price |
Tensor Core figures are dense. Prices as of October 2026.
Sources: American Compute, NVIDIA, CNBC.
Resale prices are moving apart
A100 prices are falling, H100 prices are not. The used A100 80GB fell 33.5% in the year to August 2026; the used H100 SXM rose 16.3%. H100s are among the last widely used air-cooled GPUs, and while liquid-cooled space for Blackwell stays scarce, buyers with conventional data centers bid for Hopper.
Sell A100s as whole servers. A complete HGX A100 8x80GB node was worth $95,200 in October 2026, 40% more than its parts sold separately. An HGX H100 node, at $195,000, was worth 4% more than its parts.
What a lender can count on
Neither supports a long loan on resale alone. Our conservative band puts the H100 at 11-19% of its original price in 2027 and 5-7% in 2028; the A100 is already past the end of our bands. A 2026 loan against either GPU is underwritten on the contract and the borrower.
Sources: NVIDIA, American Compute.
Residual value and appraisals
| Year | A100 | H100 |
|---|---|---|
| 2026 | - | 27-39% |
| 2027 | - | 11-19% |
| 2028 | - | 5-7% |
| 2029 | - | 2-3% |
| 2030 | - | 1% |
What a used unit is expected to fetch, as a share of its original price: the conservative band from our residual value report.
Discuss a transaction
Send us the equipment list and the loan or lease you have in mind. We will come back with an indication and the questions we would need answered.
Prefer email? hello@amcompute.com