The cheaper alternatives to AWS for GPU training are platforms that list H100 hours well below the $6.88 an H100 costs inside an on-demand AWS p5.48xlarge : Nodus at $2.60, Modal at $3.95, and Lambda and RunPod Secure Cloud at $3.99. Nodus can also connect your AWS account and, in Beta, run your jobs there first, so you spend AWS credits before you spend cash.

If you hold AWS credits, a Reserved Instance or a Savings Plan, or terabytes of data in S3, staying on AWS can still be right. The sections below show where the line falls.

Is AWS actually expensive for GPU training?

At on-demand list price, yes. We read the official AWS price list for us-east-1 on October 26, 2026: p5.48xlarge (8 x NVIDIA H100) is $55.04 per hour, which is $6.88 per H100-hour. p5en.48xlarge (8 x NVIDIA H200) is $63.296 per hour, or $7.912 per H200-hour. The A100 machines are p4d.24xlarge at $21.9576 per hour and p4de.24xlarge at $27.44705.

Those rates come from the EC2 on-demand pricing page and its public price list.…