Azure

Azure GPU pricing overview

Azure is a hyperscaler GPU cloud provider headquartered in Redmond, WA. Microsoft Azure offers ND H100 v5 and NC A100 v4 series VMs across 60+ regions, with enterprise compliance certifications including HIPAA, FedRAMP, and SOC 2 built in. Deep Active Directory and hybrid cloud integration makes it the natural GPU cloud for Microsoft-centric organizations running LLM fine-tuning or AI inference at scale. On-demand, reserved, and spot GPU billing options are available with flexible commitment terms. Billing is Pay-as-you-go, Reserved (1yr/3yr), Spot with a minimum commitment of None (pay-as-you-go). Available regions include eastus, westus2, westeurope, southeastasia and 1 more. On-demand GPU instances can be provisioned in minutes with no upfront cost, making Azure suitable for both short-duration experiments and sustained production workloads.

Azure vs other GPU providers

Azure competes with providers including Lambda Labs, CoreWeave, RunPod, Paperspace, Vast.ai, and the major hyperscalers (AWS, Google Cloud, Azure) for GPU compute workloads spanning LLM training, fine-tuning, and inference serving. Key differentiators include: Enterprise compliance; Active Directory integration; Hybrid cloud. Use the side-by-side comparison tool above to see Azure pricing against any other provider across shared GPU models. For a broader market view, the live GPU prices table shows all 3 Azure listings alongside 94+ providers in a single sortable view.

Best use cases for Azure

Azure is best suited for: Enterprise ML, Windows-based workloads, Teams on Microsoft stack. Support tiers range from Basic → Premier, making it viable for both individual researchers and enterprise teams with SLA requirements. There are currently 3 active GPU listings on Azure, covering H100 80GB, A100 80GB, V100 16GB. For workloads requiring the highest single-GPU throughput, H100 SXM5 instances with NVLink interconnect deliver the best performance per dollar at scale. For cost-sensitive fine-tuning or inference of models up to 13B parameters, A100 40GB or RTX 4090 instances typically offer the best value.

Azure billing model and cost structure

Azure uses Pay-as-you-go, Reserved (1yr/3yr), Spot pricing. On-demand instances are billed per second or per hour depending on the instance type, with no termination fees. Spot (interruptible) instances are available from $0.57/hr — typically 40–70% cheaper than on-demand rates, suitable for fault-tolerant training jobs with checkpointing. Reserved instance pricing, where available, can reduce costs by 30–60% for predictable long-running workloads. Always compare the effective hourly rate including egress, storage, and networking costs when evaluating total cost of ownership across providers.

Choosing the right GPU on Azure

GPU selection depends on model size, precision, and whether your workload is compute-bound or memory-bandwidth-bound. For LLM training above 30B parameters, H100 80GB SXM5 instances with NVLink are the standard choice — the 3,350 GB/s HBM3 bandwidth and 989 TFLOPS FP16 throughput make them 2–2.5× faster than A100 for transformer workloads. For inference of 7B–13B models in FP16 or BF16, A100 40GB offers the best cost-per-token on most providers. RTX 4090 instances are ideal for fine-tuning, prototyping, and quantized inference (INT4/INT8) of models up to 70B. Read the H100 vs A100 guide or the GPU benchmarks for ML guide for a full breakdown.

How Azure pricing data is collected

Prices shown are sourced from Azure's public pricing API or pricing page and refreshed every 15 minutes. On-demand rates reflect the current list price for a single GPU instance in the cheapest available region. Spot prices, where available, reflect interruptible instance rates at the time of the last snapshot. All prices are in USD per hour. Daily snapshots are retained for 90 days and visualised in the GPU price history charts — useful for identifying seasonal pricing patterns and evaluating whether current rates are above or below the 30-day average.

Evaluating managed LLM inference APIs as an alternative to self-hosted GPU compute? Compare live LLM token prices across OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Groq, and 14+ other providers. The cheapest GPU cloud guide covers the break-even analysis between self-hosted and managed inference at different request volumes.