H200 shortage: a comparison of B200, B300, H100, and H800 alternatives

February 2, 2026 · ApeTops Engineering

With H200 supply falling short of demand, customers are increasingly evaluating adjacent SKUs. Here is our rubric for picking the right alternative per workload.

When to pick which

  • Frontier training (1T+ parameters): B200 / B300 — the 288 GB HBM per card and 800 Gb/s fabric-ready design are worth the premium.
  • Large-model serving (70B–700B): H100 or H800 in an 8-way node remains competitive once tokenizer optimizations are applied.
  • Cost-optimized inference: H20 or L40 — 40–60% lower cost per million tokens served than H100 for RAG-heavy workloads.

The right choice depends on your quantization strategy, batch sizes, and the compositional complexity of your serving graph. Talk to us for a tailored recommendation.