AWS vs Azure: Pricing, Specs, Strengths & Weaknesses

AWS EC2 P5 instances are powered by NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs (up to 8× H100, 640 GB HBM3, 3,200 Gbps EFA networking). P5e and P5en instances use NVIDIA H200 GPUs (up to 8× H200, 1,128 GB HBM3e). P5en adds Gen5 PCIe and third-generation EFA for 35% lower latency. All three families deploy in EC2 UltraClusters scaling to 20,000 GPUs with petabit-scale nonblocking networking delivering 20 exaflops aggregate. SageMaker HyperPod manages resilient training clusters at any scale. Amazon Bedrock provides serverless access to DeepSeek v3.2, MiniMax, Kimi 3, Z.AI GLM 5, and Writer Palmyra. 30+ global regions with enterprise SLAs.

Microsoft Azure offers ND H100 v5 (8× H100, NVLink) and NC A100 v4 (4× A100) GPU VM series across 60+ regions, with enterprise compliance certifications including HIPAA, FedRAMP, and SOC 2 built in. Azure AI Foundry hosts Grok models from xAI alongside OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Mistral models. Azure Machine Learning provides managed training and inference pipelines. Deep Active Directory, hybrid cloud, and Microsoft 365 integration makes Azure the natural GPU cloud for Microsoft-centric organizations. Savings plans (1yr/3yr) and reserved instances offer up to 53% off on-demand rates.