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URL: https://willitrunai.com/gpus/a100-40gb?gpus=4

โ‡ฑ AI Models for NVIDIA A100 40GB โ€” What Runs on 40GB VRAM


NVIDIA

NVIDIA A100 40GB

Ampere DatacenterDatacenterAmperePCIe 4CUDA

Operating mode

Choose the operating mode for this hardware

Use this to bias workload recommendations toward responsiveness, background autonomy, lighter serving, or multi-GPU scale-out.

Current mode

Balanced

Balanced for general local use. Keeps the ranking neutral across personal and serving workflows.

See Full AI Tier List for NVIDIA A100 40GB โ†’

About this GPU for AI

The NVIDIA A100 40GB is the PCIe variant of NVIDIA's landmark Ampere datacenter GPU, offering the same 312 TFLOPS FP16 compute as the SXM version but with 40 GB of HBM2e and lower bandwidth at 1,555 GB/s. The PCIe form factor makes it compatible with standard servers without SXM infrastructure, and it is available on cloud providers like Google Cloud (A2) and AWS. A single A100 40GB can run 30B models with Q4 quantization and smaller 13B models near FP16, making it a practical and widely accessible inference option. It lacks the 80 GB of the SXM flagship but is substantially more affordable and available.

Beyond LLMs

AI Capability Matrix

What AI tasks this GPU can handle โ€” from text generation to image and video creation.

CapabilityStatusRepresentative ModelDetail
LLM Chat (7B)Runs nativelyLlama 3.1 8B Q4โ€”
LLM Coding (30B)Runs nativelyQwen 3 30B Q4โ€”
LLM Large (70B)
hbm-memorylarge-vramcloud-availableenterprise-grade

Specifications

Compute
FP16312 TFLOPS
INT8624 TOPS
ArchitectureAmpere
Memory
VRAM40 GB
Bandwidth1555 GB/s
General
FamilyAmpere Datacenter
SegmentDatacenter
InterconnectPCIe 4
Compute PlatformCUDA
MSRP$10,000

Key Features

40 GB HBM2e โ€” 1,555 GB/s bandwidth312 TFLOPS FP16 with sparsity / 624 INT8 TOPSPCIe 4.0 x16 form factor โ€” standard server compatibleMIG support: up to 7 isolated GPU instancesCUDA Compute Capability 8.0300W TDP

For AI Workloads

Strengths
  • 40 GB HBM2e fits 30B models at Q4 and 13B models at near-FP16 on a single card
  • Full A100 compute (312 TFLOPS FP16) at lower cost than SXM 80GB variant
  • PCIe form factor available across many cloud providers โ€” GCP A2, AWS P4de, and others
  • MIG partitioning supports up to 7 isolated inference workloads per card
Considerations
  • 40 GB cannot fit 70B models at FP16 โ€” quantization required for large models
  • Lower bandwidth (1,555 GB/s) vs. SXM 80GB (2,039 GB/s) โ€” slower decode for the same model
  • No FP8 support โ€” inference throughput trails H100 and Ada-generation GPUs
  • PCIe variant has no NVLink โ€” multi-GPU scaling limited to PCIe bandwidth

Architecture

Ampere

Ampere is NVIDIA's second-generation RTX architecture, built on Samsung's 8nm process. It introduced 3rd-generation Tensor Cores with support for sparsity-accelerated INT8 operations and improved FP16 throughput over Turing.

AI Relevance

Sparsity-aware Tensor Cores can effectively double throughput for structured sparse workloads. However, the lack of FP8 support means quantized inference is less efficient than Ada Lovelace or Blackwell.

Process: Samsung 8nmPlatform: CUDATensor Cores: Gen 3Precisions: FP32, FP16, BF16, INT8, INT4

Cost vs cloud API

3.2ร— cheaper than Claude Sonnet / GPT-4o per token

Assumes 4 hours/day of active inference at 166 tok/s, NVIDIA A100 40GB amortized over 36 months, US residential electricity ($0.15/kWh), blended cloud pricing at $10 per 1M tokens (GPT-4o / Claude Sonnet tier).

71.7M

Tokens/month at this pace

$227

Monthly local cost

$717

Same tokens on cloud API

$3.16

Local $/1M tokens

Break-even: pays for itself in 11.2 months vs cloud API at this workload. Price reference: $8.0k MSRP.

Recommendations by Workload

Chat

S

Qwen 3.5 35B A3B

Qwen 3.5 35B A3B matches Chat and keeps a practical fit profile. It is a recent-generation family, which helps on current local SOTA workloads. It fits natively with comfortable headroom. Context coverage stays within the requested workload envelope. Known distribution channels: huggingface, ollama, lm-studio.

Decode 180.5 tok/s ยท 131K ctx ยท llama.cppEST.
27.0 GB / 40.0 GB VRAM

Coding

S

Qwen 3.6 27B

Qwen 3.6 27B is a specialized fit for Coding. It is a recent-generation family, which helps on current local SOTA workloads. It fits natively with comfortable headroom. Context coverage stays within the requested workload envelope. Known distribution channels: huggingface, lm-studio.

Decode 41.7 tok/s ยท 212K ctx ยท llama.cppEST.
28.0 GB / 40.0 GB VRAM

Agentic Coding

S

Full Model Compatibility

๐Ÿ‘ Alibaba
Qwen 3.6 35B A3B
S99
35B30.4 GB166 tok/s54K ctx
+1moe
๐Ÿ‘ Alibaba
Qwen3-Coder 30B A3B Instruct
S98
30.5B25.0 GB198 tok/s180K ctx
moe
๐Ÿ‘ Alibaba
Qwen 3.5 35B A3B
S98

Just out of reach

Models you could run with an upgrade

High-quality models that need a bit more memory

Image & Video Generation

Diffusion Model Compatibility

45 of 52 models can generate images or video on your NVIDIA A100 40GB

ModelMax ResolutionGen TimeGrade
SD TurboImage512ร—512100msS
Stable Diffusion 1.5Image512ร—768200msS
Realistic Vision v5.1Image512ร—768200msS
DreamShaper 8Image512ร—768200msS
LCM DreamShaper v7

Multi-GPU scaling

NVIDIA A100 40GB โ€” Up to 4ร— via PCIe

Scale out with multiple GPUs for larger models. PCIe interconnect with 22% scaling overhead.

ConfigEffective memoryModels that fitEst. bandwidth
1ร— NVIDIA40 GB325/3741,555 GB/s
2ร— NVIDIA80 GB350/3742,426 GB/s
4ร— NVIDIA160 GB359/3744,852 GB/s

Model counts use default quantization at coding workload settings. Multi-GPU scaling factor: 0.78ร— per additional GPU.

Upgrade paths

Upgrade from NVIDIA A100 40GB

See what you unlock with more powerful hardware

Upgrade options

Upgrade options

๐Ÿ‘ NVIDIA
4ร— NVIDIA A100 40GBMulti-GPU
4 ร— 40 GB = 160 GB effectivevia PCIe
A
Unlocks 34 additional models that do not fit on the current setup.Unlocks Devstral 2 123B Instruct, Qwen 3.5 122B A10B, DeepSeek V4 Flash+31 more ยท +48% faster avg

Unlocks 34 additional models that do not fit on the current setup.

Lifts average decode speed across fitting models by about 48%.

Scale-out only pays off if the host platform has enough PCIe lanes, slot spacing, power, and cooling.

The bigger the setup gets, the more the runtime matters. Multi-GPU and multi-user serving are where vLLM, SGLang, TGI, TensorRT-LLM, or tuned llama.cpp start to earn their complexity.

~$10,000 MSRP

MacBook Pro M1 Max 64GBNext step up
64 GB Unified (+24)
A
Unlocks 11 additional models that do not fit on the current setup.Unlocks Qwen 2.5 VL 72B, Llama 3.3 70B, Llama 3.1 70B+8 more

Unlocks 11 additional models that do not fit on the current setup.

~$2,499 MSRP

๐Ÿ‘ NVIDIA
RTX PRO 5000 Blackwell 48GBNVIDIA upgrade
48 GB VRAM (+8)
A
Unlocks 13 additional models that do not fit on the current setup.Unlocks Qwen 2.5 VL 72B, Qwen3-Coder-Next, Llama 3.3 70B+10 more

Unlocks 13 additional models that do not fit on the current setup.

~$4,999 MSRP

MacBook Pro M3 Max 128GBBest value
128 GB Unified (+88)
B
Unlocks 26 additional models that do not fit on the current setup.Unlocks Devstral 2 123B Instruct, Qwen 3.5 122B A10B, Mistral Small 4 119B+23 more

Unlocks 26 additional models that do not fit on the current setup.

~$2,499 MSRP

AMD Instinct MI350X 288GBBiggest leap
288 GB VRAM (+248)8000 GB/s (+6445)
B
Unlocks 39 additional models that do not fit on the current setup.Unlocks Qwen 3.5 397B A17B, Devstral 2 123B Instruct, Qwen 3.5 122B A10B+36 more ยท +70% faster avg

Unlocks 39 additional models that do not fit on the current setup.

Lifts average decode speed across fitting models by about 70%.

~$8,000 MSRP

Frequently Asked Questions

Compare with similar

NVIDIA A100 40GB vs RTX 5090 32GBNVIDIA A100 40GB vs RTX 5000 Ada 32GBNVIDIA A100 40GB vs RTX 6000 Ada 48GB
Compare this GPUCompare with another GPU โ†’
40
GB
VRAM
1.6kGB/s
Bandwidth
312TFLOPS
FP16 Compute
624TOPS
INT8 Inference
$10,000 MSRP
NVIDIA A100 40GBCategory AvgMacBook Pro M1 Max 64GB
Needs offload
Llama 3.1 70B Q4
โ€”
Image Gen (SDXL)Runs nativelySDXL 1.0 FP16~~1s per image
Image Gen (Flux)Runs nativelyFlux.1 Dev FP16~~4.3s per image
Image Gen (SD 3.5)Runs nativelySD 3.5 Large FP16~~5.2s per image
Video Short (25f)Runs nativelyLTX Video 2B~800ms/frame
Video Long (100f)Won't fitWan Video 14B~~2.4s/frame

Qwen 3.6 27B

Qwen 3.6 27B is a specialized fit for Agentic Coding. It is a recent-generation family, which helps on current local SOTA workloads. It fits natively with comfortable headroom. Context coverage stays within the requested workload envelope. Known distribution channels: huggingface, lm-studio.

Decode 41.7 tok/s ยท 212K ctx ยท llama.cppEST.
29.0 GB / 40.0 GB VRAM

Reasoning

S

Devstral Small 2 24B Instruct

Devstral Small 2 24B Instruct matches Reasoning and keeps a practical fit profile. It is a recent-generation family, which helps on current local SOTA workloads. It fits natively with comfortable headroom. Context coverage stays within the requested workload envelope. Known distribution channels: huggingface, ollama, lm-studio.

Decode 74.9 tok/s ยท 101K ctx ยท llama.cppEST.
27.0 GB / 40.0 GB VRAM

RAG

S

Qwen 3.5 27B

Qwen 3.5 27B matches RAG and keeps a practical fit profile. It is a recent-generation family, which helps on current local SOTA workloads. It fits natively with comfortable headroom. Context coverage stays within the requested workload envelope. Known distribution channels: huggingface, ollama, lm-studio.

Decode 85.7 tok/s ยท 94K ctx ยท llama.cppEST.
27.7 GB / 40.0 GB VRAM
35B27.7 GB181 tok/s131K ctx
moe
๐Ÿ‘ Alibaba
Qwen 3.5 27B
S97
27B24.5 GB86 tok/s94K ctx
dense
๐Ÿ‘ Alibaba
Qwen3-VL 30B A3B Instruct
S97
30B24.7 GB204 tok/s184K ctx
moe
๐Ÿ‘ Alibaba
Qwen 3 32B
S97
32B28.3 GB73 tok/s64K ctx
dense
๐Ÿ‘ Alibaba
Qwen 3 30B A3B
S96
30.5B25.0 GB198 tok/s131K ctx
moe
๐Ÿ‘ NVIDIA
Nemotron 3 Nano 30B
S95
30B25.6 GB77 tok/s110K ctx
dense
๐Ÿ‘ Mistral
Magistral Small 2507
S95
24B22.0 GB96 tok/s131K ctx
dense
๐Ÿ‘ Mistral
Devstral Small 2 24B Instruct
S95
24B22.0 GB96 tok/s134K ctx
dense
๐Ÿ‘ Alibaba
Qwen 3.6 27B
S95
27B22.3 GB53 tok/s262K ctx
+1dense
๐Ÿ‘ NVIDIA
Nemotron Cascade 2 30B A3B
S94
30B26.1 GB202 tok/s92K ctx
moe
๐Ÿ‘ Mistral
Devstral Small 1.1
S93
24B22.0 GB96 tok/s131K ctx
dense
๐Ÿ‘ OpenAI
GPT-OSS 20B
S91
21B20.2 GB251 tok/s128K ctx
moe
๐Ÿ‘ LG AI
EXAONE 4.0 32B
S91
32B28.3 GB72 tok/s64K ctx
dense
๐Ÿ‘ Alibaba
Qwen 3 14B
S91
14B15.9 GB165 tok/s131K ctx
dense
๐Ÿ‘ Microsoft
Phi-4-reasoning-plus 14B
S91
14.7B16.9 GB157 tok/s33K ctx
dense
๐Ÿ‘ Alibaba
Qwen 3.5 9B
S90
9B12.6 GB126 tok/s131K ctx
dense
๐Ÿ‘ Google
Gemma 4 26B A4B
S90
25.2B23.9 GB212 tok/s86K ctx
moe
๐Ÿ‘ Google
Gemma 4 31B
S88
30.7B38.3 GB46 tok/s18K ctx
dense
๐Ÿ‘ Alibaba
Qwen 3 8B
S88
8B12.0 GB112 tok/s131K ctx
dense
๐Ÿ‘ Alibaba
Qwen 3.5 4B
S85
4B9.5 GB56 tok/s131K ctx
dense
๐Ÿ‘ Mistral
Ministral 3 14B
S85
14B15.9 GB164 tok/s174K ctx
multimodal
๐Ÿ‘ NVIDIA
Nemotron Nano 8B
A83
8B11.7 GB112 tok/s131K ctx
dense
๐Ÿ‘ Microsoft
Phi-4 Mini Reasoning 4B
A82
3.8B8.7 GB53 tok/s131K ctx
dense
๐Ÿ‘ Jina AI
Jina Embeddings v3
A75
0.57B8.0 GB8 tok/s8K ctx
dense
๐Ÿ‘ BAAI
BGE M3
A74
0.57B7.2 GB8 tok/s8K ctx
dense
๐Ÿ‘ Alibaba
Qwen 3.5 397B A17B
F0
397B249.9 GB3 tok/s4K ctx
moe
๐Ÿ‘ Mistral
Devstral 2 123B Instruct
F0
123B85.3 GB3 tok/s4K ctx
dense
๐Ÿ‘ Moonshot AI
Kimi K2.5
F0
1000B622.3 GB2 tok/s4K ctx
moe
๐Ÿ‘ Moonshot AI
Kimi K2.6
F0
1000B622.3 GB2 tok/s4K ctx
+1moe
๐Ÿ‘ DeepSeek
DeepSeek V4 Pro
F0
1600B868.8 GB2 tok/s4K ctx
moe
๐Ÿ‘ Alibaba
Qwen 3.5 122B A10B
F0
122B81.8 GB9 tok/s4K ctx
moe
๐Ÿ‘ DeepSeek
DeepSeek V4 Flash
F0
284B164.2 GB4 tok/s4K ctx
moe
๐Ÿ‘ Mistral
Mistral Small 4 119B
F0
119B82.9 GB9 tok/s4K ctx
moe
๐Ÿ‘ Cohere
Command A 111B
F0
111B76.5 GB4 tok/s4K ctx
dense
๐Ÿ‘ Alibaba
Qwen 2.5 VL 72B
F0
72B53.7 GB13 tok/s4K ctx
dense
๐Ÿ‘ OpenAI
GPT-OSS 120B
F0
117B81.2 GB3 tok/s4K ctx
dense
๐Ÿ‘ Alibaba
Qwen3-Coder-Next
F0
80B55.2 GB34 tok/s4K ctx
moe
๐Ÿ‘ Z.ai
GLM-5.1
F0
754B483.9 GB2 tok/s4K ctx
moe
๐Ÿ‘ Mistral AI
Pixtral Large 124B
F0
124B85.9 GB3 tok/s4K ctx
dense
๐Ÿ‘ Z.ai
GLM-5
F0
744B477.8 GB2 tok/s4K ctx
moe
๐Ÿ‘ DeepSeek
DeepSeek V3.2
F0
671B414.7 GB2 tok/s4K ctx
moe
๐Ÿ‘ Alibaba
Qwen 3 235B A22B
F0
235B151.1 GB4 tok/s4K ctx
moe
๐Ÿ‘ Alibaba
Qwen3-Coder 480B A35B Instruct
F0
480B300.6 GB2 tok/s4K ctx
moe
MiniMax M2.7
F0
230B149.0 GB5 tok/s4K ctx
moe
๐Ÿ‘ Mistral
Leanstral 119B A6B
F0
119B86.3 GB8 tok/s4K ctx
moe
๐Ÿ‘ DeepSeek
DeepSeek Coder V2 236B
F0
236B207.5 GB4 tok/s4K ctx
moe
๐Ÿ‘ DeepSeek
DeepSeek R1 671B
F0
671B473.8 GB2 tok/s4K ctx
moe
๐Ÿ‘ DeepSeek
DeepSeek V3.1 671B
F0
671B473.8 GB2 tok/s4K ctx
moe
Image
512ร—768
100ms
S
PixArt-SigmaImage1024ร—1024~1sS
FramePack I2VVideo256ร—256~3s/frameS
SDXL TurboImage512ร—512100msS
SDXL LightningImage1024ร—1024400msS
Stable Diffusion XL 1.0Image1024ร—1024~1sS
Playground v2.5Image1024ร—1024~1.4sS
RealVisXL v5.0Image1024ร—1024~1.1sS
DreamShaper XLImage1024ร—1024~1.1sS
Juggernaut XL v9Image1024ร—1024~1.1sS
Animagine XL 3.1Image1024ร—1024~1.1sS
Pony Diffusion V6 XLImage1024ร—1024~1.1sS
Animagine XL 4.0Image1024ร—1024~1.1sS
Illustrious XLImage1024ร—1024~1.1sS
Wan Video 2.1 1.3BVideo480ร—832700ms/frameS
Stable Diffusion 3.5 MediumImage1024ร—1024~1.7sS
Flux.2 Klein 4BImage1024ร—1024300msS
LTX Video 2BVideo1280ร—720800ms/frameS
KolorsImage1024ร—1024~1.9sS
Stable CascadeImage1024ร—1024~2.4sS
AuraFlow v0.3Image1536ร—1536~4.3sS
Stable Diffusion 3.5 LargeImage1024ร—1024~5.2sS
Stable Diffusion 3.5 Large TurboImage1024ร—1024~1sS
CogVideoX 2BVideo720ร—480800ms/frameS
HunyuanVideoVideo256ร—256~3s/frameS
ChromaImage1024ร—1024~1sS
Z-Image TurboImage1536ร—1536~1sS
Flux.1 DevImage1024ร—1024~4.3sS
Flux.1 SchnellImage1024ร—1024800msS
LTX Video 13BVideo256ร—256~3s/frameS
Flux.1 Kontext DevImage1024ร—1024~4.8sS
AnimateDiff v1.5.3Video512ร—768400ms/frameS
Cosmos Diffusion 7BVideo1024ร—576~1.4s/frameS
CogVideoX 5BVideo720ร—480~1.2s/frameS
Wan2.2 TI2V 5BVideo832ร—480~1.2s/frameS
Flux.2 Klein 9BImage1024ร—1024500msS
Flux.1 Fill DevImage1024ร—1024~4sS
Mochi 1 PreviewVideo848ร—480~1.6s/frameB
HunyuanVideo 1.5Video256ร—256~1.5s/frameB
Helios 14BVideo256ร—256~3.1s/frameD
SkyReels V2 14BVideo256ร—256~3.1s/frameD
Wan Video 2.1 14BVideo256ร—256~3.1s/frameF
Wan Video 2.2 14BVideo256ร—256~3.1s/frameF
Qwen ImageImage256ร—256~1.6sF
Qwen Image EditImage256ร—256~1.6sF
Flux.2 DevImage256ร—256~45sF
MAGI-1Video256ร—256~2.2s/frameF
HunyuanImage 3.0Image256ร—256~2.8sF

Image models estimated at 1024ร—1024 (28 steps, FP16). Video models estimated at 768ร—512 (25 frames, 30 steps, FP16). Actual performance varies with runtime and system load.

Buying advice

Should you buy NVIDIA A100 40GB for local AI?

Excellent choice for local AI

Runs 27 of 50 top models well โ€” a strong all-rounder for local inference.

40.0 GB

VRAM

$10,000

MSRP

$250/GB

Cost per GB VRAM

Best models for this GPU

What will limit you first

This setup is broadly balanced for this model.

No major red flags

This recommendation has enough memory headroom and acceptable estimated speed for the selected workload.

Best upgrade itinerary

Unlocks 11 additional models that do not fit on the current setup.

Want more headroom? MacBook Pro M1 Max 64GB (64.0 GB unified memory) is the next step up.