GCP A4 Instances with NVIDIA H100 Now GA — 67% Cheaper than AWS p5 for H100

Google Cloud's A4 instances (a4-highgpu-8g) with 8x NVIDIA H100 80GB GPUs are now generally available in us-central1, us-east4, europe-west4 and asia-southeast1. On-demand pricing: $32.77/hr. 1-year CUD: $22.94/hr. 3-year CUD: $16.39/hr. H100 delivers 3-6x better AI training throughput vs A100 for transformer models.

Cross-cloud H100 comparison: GCP A4 at $32.77/hr vs AWS p5.48xlarge (8x H100) at $98.32/hr vs Azure ND H100 v5 at $35.00/hr. GCP is 67% cheaper than AWS for the same H100 count. GCP Spot pricing for A4: approximately $9.83/hr — combined with checkpointing, this is the most cost-effective H100 training option in any cloud.

TCOIQ Action: For large model training (70B+ parameters), migrate to A4 from A100-based instances immediately. The 3-6x H100 performance uplift over A100 combined with GCP's 3-year CUD at $16.39/hr makes this the standard recommendation for ML training teams with GCP access.