GPU cloud comparison for AI work
GPU clouds differ less in the cards than in how you pay and start: per second, minute or hour; dollars or euros; a prepaid balance or an invoice; a bare VM or ready-made apps. The table puts the main providers side by side, with what each one does best.
Facts from the providers’ public pages, checked 11 November 2026. Prices and terms change: check at the source before you decide.
| Provider | Type | Billing | Currency | GPUs in Europe | Ready-made apps |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| VRAMfarm | GPU rental with ready-made AI apps | Per minute, minimum 15 minutes per launch | EUR | Some machines; the country of each one is shown before launch | ComfyUI with Flux and Wan video, private chat, text to speech; Jupyter, SSH, vLLM, Ollama, own Docker image |
| RunPod | GPU cloud with its own Secure Cloud data centres and a Community Cloud of third-party hosts; also serverless endpoints | Per second, no commitment; a new Pod needs at least one hour of credit on the balance | USD | Yes: Romania, Czechia, France, Netherlands, Sweden, plus Iceland (data centre IDs EU-RO-1, EU-CZ-1, EU-FR-1, EU-NL-1, EU-SE-1) | Official and community Pod templates plus Runpod Hub of preconfigured repos (vLLM and others), own Docker images |
| Lambda | US GPU cloud for AI: on-demand instances, 1-Click Clusters and large reserved clusters; site moved from lambda.ai to lambda.com | On-demand instances billed in one-minute increments from launch until terminate; weekly invoices | USD | One European region: europe-central-1 (Germany); other regions in the US, Asia and Middle East | No app templates; Ubuntu image with Lambda Stack (PyTorch, TensorFlow, JAX, CUDA) and JupyterLab on each instance |
| Paperspace | Legacy GPU VM and notebook platform owned by DigitalOcean; new users are directed to DigitalOcean GPU Droplets | Paperspace: per hour, plus optional Pro $8 / Growth $39 monthly plan. DO GPU Droplets: per second, 5-minute minimum | USD | DigitalOcean: H100 GPU Droplets in Amsterdam (AMS3); other GPU models only in North America. Paperspace regions not stated | Paperspace notebooks with templates; DO Droplets ship with PyTorch/CUDA images and 1-Click model guides |
| Google Colab | Hosted Jupyter notebook service from Google, free tier plus paid compute units | Compute units: Pay As You Go packs of 100 or 500, Pro 100/month, Pro+ 600/month; units expire after 90 days | Local currency at Google checkout; widely reported US prices $9.99 (Pro) and $49.99 (Pro+) per month | Paid plans sold in most EU countries (contract with Google Ireland); runtime location is not selectable or stated | Notebooks only: Python environment in the browser, no app templates, SSH or own Docker image |
| Scaleway | French public cloud with GPU instances in Paris and Warsaw | Hourly; each run between power-on and power-off billed for at least 60 minutes; monthly invoice, no commitment | EUR | Yes, EU only: France (Paris PAR-1, PAR-2) and Poland (Warsaw WAW-2); models differ by zone | GPU OS images with NVIDIA drivers and Scaleway AI Docker images (PyTorch, TensorFlow, JAX, RAPIDS with JupyterLab) |
| OVHcloud | French cloud and hosting company; Public Cloud GPU instances plus AI Notebooks, AI Deploy and AI Endpoints | Pay as you go, billed per second with a 1-minute minimum (most Public Cloud services), or monthly; monthly cannot switch back | EUR in EU (USD on other country sites) | Yes, France: Gravelines has the widest GPU choice; other regions have fewer models | Bare VMs with NGC integration; separate AI Notebooks (Jupyter/VS Code), AI Training, AI Deploy and AI Endpoints |
| Hetzner | German hosting company renting dedicated bare-metal servers with NVIDIA GPUs (GEX line) | Monthly or hourly (capped at the monthly price) plus a one-time setup fee (€209 to €3,599); cancel any time | EUR | Yes: Finland (Helsinki HEL1) and Germany (Falkenstein FSN1, GEX131 only) | None: bare server with Ubuntu, Debian or CentOS; you install drivers and software yourself |
| TensorDock | GPU marketplace of independent hosts in 100+ locations in 20+ countries, plus its own H100 fleet | Prepaid balance drawn down while servers run; exact granularity not stated; servers deleted when balance nears $0 | USD | Some: e.g. A100 80 GB in Devon (UK) and Prague (Czechia); docs also mention Germany | OS templates with Docker, ML image with Jupyter, Windows 10; Instant VMs in beta. No app catalogue |
How to choose
Short sessions and experiments
Per-second or per-minute billing and a prepaid balance matter more than the lowest hourly price. Ten 20-minute sessions cost 200 minutes, not 10 hours.
Long training runs
Look at the price of 80 GB cards, multi-GPU machines in one box, and whether storage survives a stop. Reserved or monthly plans pay off only with steady load.
Company with EU data rules
Check where the machine is, who processes the data, and whether you get a DPA and VAT invoices. EU clouds such as Scaleway and OVHcloud are built for this; most marketplaces are not.
No-code results
If you want images, video or a chat without setting anything up, ready-made apps save the first hour of every session.
Try VRAMfarm on a real task
Top up from €10, start a card for an hour, and compare the bill yourself.