The Cheapest CUDA GPU on AWS Has an Arm CPU — and You Probably Want the Intel One
This article provides a step by step deployment guide for Gemma 4 E2B onto the two cheapest whole GPU CUDA instances AWS sells, and compares what they cost to run. A suite of Python MCP tools is built to simplify management of the vLLM hosted deployment. Everything was measured on 2026-08-30. What is this project trying to Do? The question is simple: if you want a CUDA GPU on AWS as cheaply as…
The article explains how to deploy Gemma 4 E2B onto the two cheapest whole GPU CUDA instances AWS sells, comparing their costs. The two instances are G5g and G4dn, both with NVIDIA T4 GPUs, but they differ in their host CPUs. G5g uses a Graviton2 (Arm) host, while G4dn uses an Intel host. The article concludes that the cheapest real CUDA GPU on AWS is an Arm box, which is 20% cheaper per hour on demand and 59% cheaper on spot.
However, the rest of the article reveals that the host CPU determines which kernels you get, making the choice between the two instances dependent on whether you're buying hours or tokens.
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