Run AI on Your Own Hardware
No cloud. No subscription. No data leaving your machine. This section covers everything you need to run, configure, and fine-tune AI models locally โ from a $400 mini PC to a $2000 GPU workstation.
100% private
Your prompts and data never leave your machine. No API logs, no training on your conversations.
No subscription
Pay once for hardware and run unlimited queries for free. One GPU pays for itself in weeks.
Works offline
Run a full LLM on a plane, in a bunker, or on an air-gapped server. No internet required.
Where do you want to start?
Step-by-step guides
All local AI guidesSperidlabs Idol: Turn One Photo into a 3D Gaussian Splat, and How to Run It
Idol is an open image-to-3D model from Sperid Labs that turns a single photo into a 3D Gaussian splat, generating up to 1,048,576 Gaussians in under 2 seconds on a consumer GPU with 7.2 GB of VRAM. It runs locally through the idol-sdk Python package under Apache 2.0.
LFM3-Omni-2B: Liquid AI's 2.2B Any-to-Any Model, and How to Run It Locally
LFM3-Omni-2B is Liquid AI's 2.17 billion parameter any-to-any model: one checkpoint that reads text, images, video and audio, and answers in text or 24 kHz speech. Built for phones and laptops, it ships as a BF16 checkpoint and a GGUF build as small as 1.05 GB, and runs through llama.cpp, Ollama or a browser WebGPU demo.
SenseNova-Loop-9B-Preview: A Looped Multimodal Model for Long-Context Work, and How to Run It
SenseNova-Loop-9B-Preview is a 9.66 billion parameter multimodal model that accepts text and images and generates text. Its unusual design runs 32 distinct decoder layers through 56 layer-executions per forward pass by looping a shared block of weights twice, giving it deeper computation without a proportional increase in stored parameters.
How to Run WeVisOne-VL-4B Locally: Tencent's All-in-One Vision Model
WeVisOne-VL-4B is a 4.83 billion parameter vision-language model from Tencent's WeChat Vision team, built on Qwen3-VL, released under Apache 2.0. One model handles object detection, referring localization, counting, pointing, OCR, segmentation and promptable alpha matting, and it runs locally through a pip-installable package with either a transformers or vLLM backend.
How to Run Mistral Large 4 (1T-A52B) Locally: The Hardware It Actually Needs
Mistral Large 4 is Mistral AI's largest release yet: a 1 trillion parameter multimodal mixture-of-experts model with 49 billion active parameters per token, a 1 million token context window, and FP8 weights split across 54 safetensors shards. Mistral's own vLLM example asks for 8 GPUs, so this is a datacenter model, not something a single workstation can load.
How to Run Hy-SimulMT-30B-A3B-FP8 Locally: Tencent's Real-Time Speech Translator
Hy-SimulMT-30B-A3B-FP8 is Tencent Hunyuan's 30.39 billion parameter model for real-time Chinese-English speech translation, with an FP8-quantized mixture-of-experts core that cuts the weight footprint roughly in half next to the BF16 release. It runs through Tencent's own SimulInfer server on an NVIDIA GPU with vLLM 0.31 or newer, and streams translated text and cloned speech while the speaker is still talking.
How to Run Chroma1-HD Locally: An Open Base Model for Text-to-Image
Chroma1-HD is an 8.9 billion parameter text-to-image model built on FLUX.1-schnell and released under a fully permissive Apache 2.0 license. It runs through Hugging Face Diffusers on an NVIDIA GPU, and its real selling point is that it's meant as a clean, unrestricted base for finetuning rather than a finished chatbot-style product.
How to Run Nemotron 3.5 Parse Locally: NVIDIA's 630M Document Parsing Model
Nemotron 3.5 Parse is NVIDIA's 630.8 million parameter vision-language model built to turn document images into structured text with layout classes, bounding boxes, and reading order. It runs through Hugging Face Transformers or vLLM, needs roughly 1.3 GB of bfloat16 weights, and hits 15.42 pages per second in NVIDIA's single-pass benchmark on an H100.
Models to run locally
22 modelsEvery model is free to download and run. Requirements listed are for the Q4 quantized version โ the best balance of quality and size.
Llama 3.1 8B
Meta ยท Llama 3.1 Community
Meta's 8B workhorse with a massive 128K context window. Punches well above its weight class for everyday coding and chat tasks, runs comfortably on any consumer GPU with 6 GB VRAM, and delivers near-70B quality on many benchmarks.
Min VRAM
5 GB
Context
128K
Run with Ollama
ollama run llama3.1:8bLlama 3.3 70B
Meta ยท Llama 3.3 Community
Meta's flagship open-weight model and the go-to choice for users who want GPT-4-class performance without sending data to the cloud. Consistently tops open-source leaderboards. Needs ~48 GB VRAM at Q4_K_M โ a dual-GPU rig or Apple Silicon with 48 GB unified memory.
Min VRAM
48 GB
Context
128K
Run with Ollama
ollama run llama3.3:70bLlama 3.2 3B
Meta ยท Llama 3.2 Community
The smallest production-quality Llama model, designed to run on laptops, Raspberry Pis, and other edge devices with minimal VRAM. Response latency is sub-second on modern CPUs, making it ideal for real-time assistants and local automation scripts.
Min VRAM
2 GB
Context
128K
Run with Ollama
ollama run llama3.2:3bQwen3 8B
Alibaba ยท Apache 2.0
One of the most-downloaded mid-size AI models on HuggingFace in 2026, with tens of millions of downloads. Qwen3 8B outperforms the previous Qwen2.5 14B on most benchmarks, supports hybrid thinking mode and tool calling, and runs on any GPU with 6 GB VRAM. Apache 2.0 license โ fully commercial.
Min VRAM
5 GB
Context
128K
Run with Ollama
ollama run qwen3:8bQwen3.8-27B
Alibaba ยท Apache 2.0
Alibaba's newest Qwen release, published August 14, 2026 under Apache 2.0. A 27B dense model that adds native image and video understanding on top of text, with a 256K context window long enough for hour-scale video or entire codebases. At Q4 it needs about 18 GB of VRAM, so it fits a single 24 GB card with room to spare. Pull it with ollama run qwen3.8:27b.
Min VRAM
18 GB
Context
256K
Run with Ollama
ollama run qwen3.8:27bMistral 7B v0.3
Mistral AI ยท Apache 2.0
The model that proved 7B parameters can match much larger models on reasoning tasks when trained carefully. Apache 2.0 licensed, so it is fully free to use commercially with no restrictions.
Min VRAM
4 GB
Context
32K
Run with Ollama
ollama run mistral:7bBest local LLM for your hardware
Already know your VRAM budget, GPU or Mac? These pages list every model from the verified catalog that fits, with headroom, run commands and spec-sheet links.
Hardware picks
Full buyer's guideThese are affiliate links. We earn a small commission if you buy through them โ at no extra cost to you. Disclosure
NVIDIA RTX 5090 32GB
32 GB GDDR7, 512-bit bus, 575W TDP, 21,760 CUDA cores
Most VRAM on any consumer card โ the current flagship for 34Bโ70B local inference
Runs these models
NVIDIA RTX 5080 16GB
16 GB GDDR7, 256-bit bus, 360W TDP, 10,752 CUDA cores
Current-gen 16 GB card with GDDR7 speed for fast 7Bโ34B inference
Runs these models
NVIDIA RTX 5070 Ti 16GB
16 GB GDDR7, 256-bit bus, 300W TDP, 8,960 CUDA cores
Best current-gen value โ 16 GB GDDR7 for 7Bโ34B at a mid-tier price
Runs these models
NVIDIA RTX 4060 Ti 16GB
16 GB GDDR6, 128-bit bus, 165W TDP, 4,352 CUDA cores
Best VRAM-per-dollar entry card for running 13B models locally
Runs these models
NVIDIA RTX 4070 Super 12GB
12 GB GDDR6X, 192-bit bus, 220W TDP, 7,168 CUDA cores
Sweet-spot performance for fast 7B and 13B token generation
Runs these models
NVIDIA RTX 4080 Super 16GB
16 GB GDDR6X, 256-bit bus, 320W TDP, 10,240 CUDA cores
High-throughput inference for 7Bโ34B models at serious speed
Runs these models
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Affiliate disclosure
Hardware links on this page go to Amazon via our affiliate program. We earn a small commission when you buy through them. This does not change the price you pay or influence our recommendations โ every pick is chosen based on VRAM, value, and real performance for local AI workloads.