This NVIDIA H200 price guide compares prices across major cloud providers and explores why ionstream.ai’s flexible offerings stand out in the market with both virtualized and bare metal solutions.

When it comes to H200 pricing and deployment options, choosing the right provider can significantly impact both performance and cost.

The NVIDIA H200, priced as a premium GPU solution, delivers approximately 50% faster performance than its predecessor the H100. With its impressive 141GB of HBM3e memory and enhanced bandwidth of 4.8 TB/s, the H200 offers substantial improvements in processing speed while maintaining similar power consumption to the H100.

When evaluating this NVIDIA H200 price guide, it’s crucial to understand how different deployment models affect both cost and performance.

Cloud providers offer these powerful GPUs through different deployment models, each with distinct characteristics that can significantly impact performance and cost-effectiveness:

Virtualized Deployments:

• AWS provides H200 GPUs through their EC2 P5 instances, which operate on shared infrastructure. While the allocated resources (CPU, memory, GPU) are logically isolated, the physical hardware is shared among multiple customers. This shared infrastructure model allows for flexible scaling but introduces potential performance variability.
• CoreWeave and Runpod.io similarly utilize virtualization technology, where physical resources are partitioned and shared among multiple users. This approach offers deployment flexibility but can introduce additional overhead and performance inconsistencies.
• ionstream.ai offers virtualized H200 instances as part of their comprehensive solution set, providing the flexibility and scalability benefits of virtualization while maintaining competitive pricing and performance.
• These virtualized environments typically offer various pricing models, including on-demand (pay-as-you-go), reserved instances (1-3 year commitments for discounts), and spot instances (lower cost but with potential interruption risks).

Bare Metal Deployments:

• ionstream.ai distinguishes itself by also providing dedicated, bare metal H200 servers. This means customers get exclusive access to the physical hardware without any virtualization layer.
• Direct hardware access ensures consistent performance without the overhead of virtualization, maximizing GPU utilization and bandwidth between GPUs.
• The bare metal approach provides complete control over the computing environment, allowing organizations to optimize at the hardware level, customize CUDA drivers, and implement specific security requirements.

When comparing H200 prices across providers, it’s important to note that the following rates reflect on-demand pricing for an 8x NVIDIA H200 configuration, which offers maximum flexibility with no long-term commitments.

While some providers offer reduced rates for committed usage or reserved instances, we’ll focus on on-demand 8x H200 prices to provide a direct comparison.

ionstream.ai delivers multiple configurations to suit different needs:

• Bare Metal: $30 per hour for 8x NVIDIA H200 GPUs paired with 192 CPUs, 1.5TB RAM, and 30.4TB of storage, providing direct hardware access and complete control.
• Virtualized: Competitive virtualized instances with flexible resource allocation, ideal for workloads that prioritize scalability over raw performance.

Runpod.io provides their 8x H200 configuration at $31.92 per hour through a virtualized platform, featuring 192 vCPU, 2TB of RAM, and 40GB of storage.

CoreWeave offers their 8x H200 configuration through their virtualized platform at $50.44 per hour, featuring 128 vCPU, 2TB of RAM, and 61.44TB of storage.

AWS provides their 8x H200 configuration at $43.36 per hour, also through a virtualized instance. Like CoreWeave and Runpod.io, AWS uses virtualization technology to manage their infrastructure, which can impact performance predictability and overall system control.

Let’s examine how this NVIDIA H200 price guide translates costs over different time periods:

The NVIDIA H200 price guide comparison tells a compelling story. Organizations choosing ionstream.ai’s bare metal solution can save up to $179,054.40 annually compared to CoreWeave, $117,033.60 compared to AWS, and $16,819.20 compared to Runpod.io.

Even compared to the closest competitor in pricing, ionstream.ai still offers significant savings while providing the advantages of bare metal deployment.

Optimizing H200 Costs with Commitment Pricing

These H200 pricing advantages become even more substantial through ionstream.ai’s commitment options. With annual and multi-annual agreements, organizations can reduce their H200 price to as low as $2.57 per hour with no upfront costs.

For those able to provide a 20% upfront buydown, the rate drops even further to $1.91 per hour – offering potential annual savings of up to 93% compared to on-demand rates from other providers.

These remarkable cost reductions, combined with the performance benefits of bare metal deployment, make ionstream.ai’s commitment pricing an exceptionally attractive option for organizations with consistent, long-term AI computing needs.

The Bare Metal Advantage

ionstream.ai’s bare metal solution fundamentally transforms how organizations can leverage H200 GPUs. By eliminating the virtualization layer, users gain direct access to the hardware, resulting in consistently superior performance.

This direct hardware access ensures maximum GPU utilization and eliminates the unpredictable performance variations often experienced with virtualized instances.

Performance optimization reaches new heights with bare metal deployment. The absence of virtualization overhead means every ounce of computing power is available to your workloads.

This translates to better memory bandwidth, lower latency, and full utilization of NVLink bandwidth between GPUs – critical factors for large-scale AI training and inference tasks.

Security considerations also favor bare metal deployments. Physical isolation from other customers’ workloads provides an inherent security advantage that virtualized environments simply cannot match.

Organizations maintain complete control over their security implementations, firmware versions, and driver configurations, ensuring alignment with their specific security requirements.

The ability to customize and control the environment sets bare metal solutions apart. Organizations can optimize at the hardware level, install custom CUDA drivers, and allocate PCIe lanes according to their specific needs.

This level of control is particularly valuable for organizations pushing the boundaries of AI research and development.

AI research teams working on cutting-edge projects will find ionstream.ai’s H200 pricing particularly compelling. For those requiring maximum performance and predictable behavior, the bare metal option ensures consistent GPU performance and reliable benchmarking.

Teams needing more flexible scaling can leverage the virtualized instances for development and testing, with competitive H200 prices for both options.

Enterprise AI development teams benefit from having both deployment options available. The bare metal environment provides dedicated resources for production workloads and performance-critical applications, while virtualized instances offer cost-effective scaling for development and testing environments.

High-performance computing users, including those running scientific simulations and computational research, will appreciate the choice between bare metal’s direct hardware access and virtualized instances’ flexibility.

The ability to choose the right deployment model for specific workloads ensures maximum efficiency for demanding calculations.

ionstream.ai’s comprehensive H200 pricing and deployment options represent a perfect balance of flexibility and performance.

By providing both bare metal and virtualized deployment options at competitive H200 prices, organizations can choose the ideal configuration for their specific needs while optimizing their cloud computing budget.

With potential annual savings exceeding $179,000 compared to competing H200 offerings, alongside superior performance characteristics, ionstream.ai stands as the clear choice for organizations looking to maximize their AI infrastructure investment.

Whether choosing bare metal for maximum performance or virtualized instances for scalability, organizations get exactly what they need at an industry-leading H200 price point.

For organizations ready to take their AI initiatives to the next level, ionstream.ai’s H200 solutions offer unmatched value in terms of both performance and cost-effectiveness.