AWS vs PowerGPU at a glance
AWS
Amazon EC2 GPU instances: P5 (H100), P4d (A100), G6e (L40S), G5 (A10G), G4dn (T4)
PowerGPU
Fixed prices at market median × 0.70, crypto only, verified datacenters
| AWS | PowerGPU | |
|---|---|---|
| Billing | Per second, 60-second minimum | Per second, no minimum, price locked at deploy |
| Payment | Card, invoicing | Crypto only — USDT (TRC-20/ERC-20), BTC, XMR, LTC, ETH, TRX, SOL |
| Identity | Card and identity verification; GPU quotas must be requested | Email + password. No KYC, no card, no stored IP addresses |
| Free credit | Free tier excludes GPU instances | None — every hour is ≥30% under the market median instead |
| Cheaper tier | Spot (−50–70%, interruptible), Savings Plans, Capacity Blocks | Interruptible flat −50% (no auction) · reserved −35% (3+ months) |
| Regions | 30+ | 32 regions on 5 continents, verified datacenters only |
| Minimums | P5 and P4d are 8-GPU instances only | None — 1× to 8× GPUs at the same per-GPU price |
| Storage | EBS gp3 $0.08/GB/mo | $0.08/GB/month NVMe, volumes survive instances |
| Egress | $0.09/GB after the first 100 GB | $0.01/GB in and out, every region |
| Access | VMs, SageMaker, EKS, full AWS API | Containers or full KVM VMs, SSH, Jupyter, REST API, CLI, Python SDK |
AWS column: as published on aws.amazon.com on 2026-09-03. Details change — verify before you decide.
AWS vs PowerGPU prices, GPU by GPU
Public on-demand list prices per GPU-hour on AWS's pricing page (2026-09-03) against PowerGPU's fixed rates today — every PowerGPU price is the public marketplace median × 0.70, rounded down, re-checked weekly.
| GPU | AWS list | PowerGPU on-demand | PowerGPU interruptible | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| H100 SXM p5.48xlarge on-demand, us-east-1, per GPU · Capacity Blocks ~$5.19 | $6.88 | $1.587 | $0.793 | −77% on PowerGPU |
| A100 SXM4 p4d.24xlarge, 40 GB per GPU, per GPU | $4.10 | $0.583 | $0.291 | −86% on PowerGPU |
| L40S g6e.xlarge | $1.86 | $0.466 | $0.233 | −75% on PowerGPU |
| A10 g5.xlarge (A10G 24 GB) | $1.01 | $0.168 | $0.084 | −83% on PowerGPU |
| Tesla T4 g4dn.xlarge | $0.53 | $0.104 | $0.052 | −80% on PowerGPU |
Configurations differ (node sizes, tiers, regions); the note beside each card says which AWS price is quoted. Negative differences mean AWS is cheaper on that card.
When to stay with AWS
- Your data lives in S3 with IAM policies and compliance frameworks you cannot re-certify elsewhere.
- You use SageMaker, Bedrock or EKS as the platform, not just the GPU.
- An enterprise agreement already discounts your list prices heavily.
Why teams switch to PowerGPU
- Price: an H100 SXM on p5.48xlarge is $6.88 per GPU-hour on-demand; PowerGPU fixes it at the public market median × 0.70 — a several-fold gap on the same silicon.
- One GPU when you need one GPU: P5 and P4d only come as 8-GPU instances; PowerGPU rents 1× to 8× at the same per-GPU price.
- No quota requests, no card, no KYC: deploy in 30 seconds after a crypto top-up.
- Egress at $0.01/GB versus $0.09/GB — a 10 TB result set costs $100 here, about $900 on AWS.
Switching from AWS: what maps to what
| On AWS | On PowerGPU |
|---|---|
| p5.48xlarge (8× H100) | 8× H100 SXM machine, or 1×/2×/4× at the same per-GPU price |
| g6e / g5 instance | L40S / A10 instance, or an RTX 5090 at a fraction of the price |
| EBS volume | Volume, $0.08/GB/month |
| Spot instance | Interruptible instance, flat −50%, auto-requeue |
| Deep Learning AMI | PyTorch / NGC / CUDA templates or a full Ubuntu VM |
pip install powergpu
export POWERGPU_API_KEY=pg_live_… # console → API keys
powergpu launch --gpu h100-sxm --template pytorch --disk 100 --volume data:/data
# ✓ instance i-52ab77c1 running (24.1s) · $1.587/hr · per second
powergpu stop i-52ab77c1 # billing ends this secondData moves the boring way: rsync or rclone from your AWS machine to a PowerGPU volume, which then mounts on every future instance in seconds. Templates for PyTorch, vLLM, ComfyUI and Ollama are official images; anything else runs from its OCI reference.
A real month, costed
| Scenario | AWS | PowerGPU |
|---|---|---|
| 1× H100 SXM, 730 hours on-demand | $5,022 | $1,159 |
| 1× H100 SXM, 8 h/day × 20 days | $1,101 | $254 |
| Same 160 hours, PowerGPU interruptible | — | $127 |
| 500 GB of storage, one month | EBS gp3 $0.08/GB/mo | $40 |
Run your own schedule through the cost calculator — it adds storage and bandwidth and compares against the marketplace median.
AWS GPU alternative: FAQ
How much cheaper is PowerGPU than AWS for an H100?
AWS lists p5.48xlarge at $55.04/hr on-demand in us-east-1 — $6.88 per H100 (checked 2026-09-03); PowerGPU fixes the H100 SXM at the public market median × 0.70. Even AWS Capacity Blocks (~$5.19/GPU-hr, prepaid) stay far above.
Can I rent a single H100 on PowerGPU?
Yes — 1×, 2×, 4× or 8× per machine at the same per-GPU price, deployed in about 30 seconds. On AWS the P5 family only exists as 8-GPU instances.
What about data in S3?
Pull it once onto a PowerGPU volume (AWS egress applies on their side), then every instance mounts it from NVMe. Results go back for $0.01/GB.
Try the switch for the price of a coffee
Top up $30 in USDT or Monero, deploy the same image you run on AWS, and benchmark it. No card, no KYC, per-second billing — stop it the minute you are done.
AWS and its logo are trademarks of their owner, used here only to identify the compared service; PowerGPU is not affiliated with AWS. NVIDIA GPU names are trademarks of NVIDIA Corporation.
