NVIDIA A30
A 24 GB HBM2 accelerator for shared enterprise servers. It has more memory bandwidth than L4, but an older compute architecture.
HBM2
Published peak, not measured application throughput
The NVLink bridge connects at most two A30s. Four MIG slices are four smaller allocations, not four copies of the full 24 GB card.
When this is a sensible choice
Start here if…
Consider A30 for small inference services or modest training jobs on an existing Ampere fleet. MIG can divide it among workloads that fit within a partition.
Choose another configuration if…
A 27B model at eight bits already exceeds 24 GB before cache. Choose more memory or a supported smaller checkpoint; faster HBM cannot fix a capacity shortfall.
Specifications with their boundaries attached
- Architecture
- Ampere
- Memory
- 24 GB HBM2
- Memory bandwidth
- 0.93 TB/s per accelerator
- Peak compute
- 165 TFLOPS BF16/FP16, dense; no native FP8 tensor path
- Scale-up interconnect
- NVLink 3: 200 GB/s; bridge supports up to two GPUs
- Host attachment
- PCIe 4.0 x16
- Power
- 165 W maximum TDP
- Partitioning
- Up to four MIG instances of 6 GB
- Catalogue status
- Documented product
Compute figures are theoretical peaks at the stated precision. Dense and structured-sparse rates must not be mixed. Bandwidth labelled bidirectional combines both directions. See the source documents.
Three bandwidths, three different jobs
NVLink 3: 200 GB/s; bridge supports up to two GPUs
InfiniBand, RoCE, EFA or provider-specific transport
Where it appears in provider documentation
No provider configuration has been verified for this exact variant in this reference. Consult the linked manufacturer documentation; catalogue absence here is not evidence that the hardware is unavailable.
Model fit and software support
These publisher or serving-engine documents mention this hardware family. They have not been reproduced on our machines.
No model-specific recipe in our reviewed set certifies this exact hardware. The memory calculator can narrow candidates, but it cannot establish software support. Read the model register.
What is the memory floor?
Start with total parameters, then add the memory the workload needs. This arithmetic does not certify a serving configuration. All output sizes below are decimal GB.
Override device capacity with the memory exposed by your allocation, particularly for cloud B300 and partitioned devices. The starting 32 GB budget and 15% reserve are editable teaching assumptions. They are not measurements for the selected model. Mixed-precision tensors, quantization scales, vision encoders and draft models can increase the weight payload.
Raw weights only
320B × 8 bits ÷ 8
Budget per device
24 GB × (1 − 15%)
Arithmetic lower bound
round up ((weights + 32) ÷ budget)
This assumes perfectly balanced sharding. A result of three does not prove that a three-device parallel layout is supported. Check layer/expert divisibility, actual allocatable memory, precision kernels and the fabric before renting.
320B is the model card’s total; 18B active is not its storage size. The vLLM recipe reports about 306 GiB for the native FP8 checkpoint. Hopper requires BF16 KV for this model; the documented ROCm path targets gfx950, not every Instinct GPU. Read the model source ↗
For full training, also budget gradients, optimizer states, activations and communication buffers. The inference weight estimate above is insufficient.
Tokens per second, TTFT and TPOT are not certified for this hardware in our reference. Use the benchmark checklist to compare an exact model, software revision and workload.
Nearby memory capacities, different tradeoffs
These are comparison candidates selected by memory capacity, not performance rankings or drop-in replacements.
NVIDIA A10
A 24 GB graphics-capable server GPU. It offers more memory than T4, without the HBM or switched links of A100.
NVIDIA L4
A low-power 24 GB inference and media GPU. More compute does not imply more memory bandwidth: its published 300 GB/s is below A10.
NVIDIA T4
A small inference GPU for a model that already fits. Its 16 GB capacity is usually the first limit a new LLM user encounters.
Sources and review scope
Manufacturer and cloud documentation checked 2026-09-12. We reviewed specifications and the stated product boundaries; we did not run training or serving benchmarks on this device. Cloud memory and availability can differ by configuration.
- NVIDIA A30 specifications ↗ · checked 2026-09-12
Cite this reference
AI Infra Interviews. NVIDIA A30: specifications and workload fit. Reviewed . https://aiinfrainterviews.com/hardware/a30
Include your access date when citing a changing specification. Link to the specification section for hardware figures or the explanation for a sizing or workload decision.
Research method and limits
We compile manufacturer specifications, cloud documentation, model cards and serving recipes. The reference preserves source units and distinguishes individual devices from nodes and racks. Conflicting figures and unknown fields remain labelled.
Our contribution is the comparison, unit reconciliation, worked arithmetic and workload explanation. Published peaks are vendor specifications. Calculator results are estimates under the displayed assumptions. Neither is a measurement from our own accelerator lab.
For a manufacturer’s specification, consult the original source documents. Cite our page when using its analysis, and retain primary-source attribution for underlying figures. This curated reference does not establish market share, live availability or a universal performance ranking.
Found a discrepancy? Send a correction with the page URL, exact variant, disputed figure and supporting primary document.