NVIDIA A40: rent or buy?

Cheapest rental today: $0.35/hr on RunPod community. Cheapest to buy: $3,935 on eBay. At 300 W and $0.17/kWh, running it yourself costs $0.051/hr in electricity, so each hour you own instead of rent saves $0.30, and buying pays off after about 13,161 hours of use.

GPURentBuyBuying pays offRent it out
NVIDIA A4048 GB · 300 W $0.35/hrRent on RunPod $3,935Buy on eBay 13,161 h4.5 yr at 8 h/day $143/mopays back in 2.3 yr

Rent-out defaults (50% of hours rented, 25% to the platform) are our assumptions, not provider figures: set your own above. Electricity uses each card's board power.

How the math works

Pays off after = buy price ÷ (rental rate − electricity per hour). Electricity per hour = the card's board power in kW × your rate. That's the hours of use after which owning has cost less than renting. It leaves out the rest of the computer, resale value (used GPUs often sell for a good share of what they cost), and rental storage and bandwidth fees, which all favour buying or renting in different cases.

Rent it out = the typical listed hourly rate for this card (the middle of the current offers) × % of hours rented × (1 − platform cut), minus electricity for the hours it runs, over a 730-hour month. Payback = buy price ÷ that monthly figure. Hosting also needs a full machine, fast internet and uptime; real earnings vary with demand.

Other GPUs

All GPUs, rent vs buy →

Rates as listed on 2026-11-05 (on-demand, US dollars per GPU-hour), checked twice a day; eBay prices are item + shipping. Vast.ai, RunPod and Massed Compute links are referral links; we may earn credit if you sign up. All GPU rental prices · NVIDIA A40 eBay price history