GPU servers: dedicated, bare-metal, VPS and GPU-as-a-service

A GPU server is a machine with one or more GPUs attached, rented for compute-heavy work: AI training and inference, rendering, simulation. In practice the term covers three different products. A dedicated or bare-metal GPU server gives you a whole physical machine. A GPU VPS or cloud GPU server gives you a virtualized instance with a GPU attached, rentable by the hour. GPU-as-a-service abstracts the server away entirely and bills per second of compute. All three run the same chips; they differ in isolation, billing granularity and price.

A dedicated (bare-metal) GPU server is a physical machine reserved for you alone: full hardware access, no virtualization overhead, and usually a full node of 8 GPUs with fast interconnect for training. In our data these are the offers with a multi-GPU minimum, currently sold by AWS, CoreWeave, Massed Compute, Microsoft Azure, OVHcloud, Vultr. A cloud GPU server (or GPU VPS) is a virtualized instance carved from shared hardware, rentable one GPU at a time by the hour, which is what most of the 17 single-GPU providers in our index sell. Dedicated wins on isolation and interconnect; cloud instances win on flexibility and entry price.

At today's verified rates (2026-07-18), running a server around the clock costs its hourly rate times 730 hours. The cheapest on-demand GPU in our index, the RTX A4000 at $0.10/hr, works out to about $73/month; an H100 at the cheapest on-demand rate of $1.99/hr works out to about $1,453/month. That assumes 100% uptime: per-second and per-minute billing means you only pay for hours you actually use, and spot or community capacity cuts the rate further if your work tolerates interruption. Storage and egress are billed separately by many providers.

A GPU VPS (virtual private server with a GPU) is a virtualized slice of a physical machine with a GPU passed through to it: you get root access and a dedicated GPU, but share the underlying host with other tenants. Hosting companies say GPU VPS; AI clouds say on-demand GPU instance or cloud GPU. They are the same product category, and the on-demand prices on this page are exactly that: virtualized instances with dedicated GPUs, billed by the hour or finer.