DeepSeek R1 VRAM Requirements

DeepSeek R1 at a glance

Made by

DeepSeek, China

Released

January 20, 2025

Parameters

684.5B, 37B active

Context window

160K tokens

License

MIT, commercial use allowed

On Hugging Face

14K likes, 1.1M downloads last month (opens in a new tab)

Runs with

vLLM, SGLang, llama.cpp (Ollama, LM Studio), MLX (Mac) · vLLM recipe (opens in a new tab)

On Ollama

ollama run deepseek-r1 94M pulls (opens in a new tab)

VRAM by precision and context length

Weights plus the KV cache of one request (BF16 cache), in GiB. Add 1 to 3 GiB for the inference engine itself.

DeepSeek R1 GGUF files

Exact size of each quantization in unsloth/DeepSeek-R1-GGUF (opens in a new tab), and the smallest GPU that runs it with llama.cpp, Ollama or LM Studio and an 8K-token context.

Read every day from Hugging Face. Split files are added together; vision projectors are left out.

How many GPUs to run DeepSeek R1

Fewest GPUs that fit the weights plus one 8K-token request. Data-center GPUs use vLLM (90% of memory usable), the others llama.cpp. Several GPUs split the model with tensor or pipeline parallelism.

Cheapest way to run DeepSeek R1 today

For each GPU: the fewest cards that fit DeepSeek R1 with one 8K-token request, the most faithful weight format at that count, and the cheapest on-demand price (2026-10-10).

On-demand prices from RunPod, Vast.ai, Verda and Azure, checked every hour. Serving many users needs more KV cache, so more memory: size it in the calculator. Some links are affiliate links: StudioTV may earn a commission, at no extra cost to you.

KV cache: how memory grows with context

Architecture: MoE 256 experts · MLA (512 + 64 latent) on 61 layers. Its cache stays compact because MLA stores one compressed latent per token and layer instead of full keys and values. Only 37B parameters are active per token, but all 684B must sit in memory: VRAM depends on the total, speed on the active part.

DeepSeek R1 VRAM badge

For a model card or a README: the 4-bit size and the smallest GPU it fits on, linked to this page. Data as JSON: /api/models/deepseek-r1.json.

[![DeepSeek R1 VRAM](https://studiotvai.com/badge/deepseek-r1.svg)](https://studiotvai.com/vram-requirements/deepseek-r1)

Other models

Same family (large moe): MiniMax M2.7 · Kimi K2.6 · GLM-5.3 · GLM-5.3-Flash · DeepSeek V4 Flash · DeepSeek V4 Pro · DeepSeek V4.1 Flash · MiMo-V2.6 Pro · MiMo-V2.6 Flash · Kimi K3 · Mistral Large 4 · DeepSeek V4 Flash Vision Exp · Qwen3.8 2.4T-A95B · Ornith 1.5 397B · Atria Dawn Preview · Intern S2 397B

All models: Llama 3.1 8B · Mistral Small 3.2 24B · Qwen3 32B · Llama 3.3 70B · Llama 3.1 405B · Qwen3.5 4B · Qwen3.5 9B · Qwen3.8 27B · Qwen3.6 35B-A3B · Qwen3.5 122B-A10B · Qwen3.8-Flash-Next · LFM2.5 8B-A1B · LFM2 24B-A2B · Gemma 4 12B · Gemma 4 31B · Gemma 4 26B-A4B · gpt-oss 20B · gpt-oss 120B · Llama 4 Scout 17B-16E · Llama 4 Maverick 17B-128E · Kolibri-1 · Nemotron 3 Nano 30B-A3B · Nemotron 3 Super 120B-A12B · MiniMax M2.7 · Kimi K2.6 · GLM-5.3 · GLM-5.3-Flash · DeepSeek V4 Flash · DeepSeek V4 Pro · DeepSeek V4.1 Flash · MiMo-V2.6 Pro · MiMo-V2.6 Flash · Kimi K3 · Mistral Large 4 · Qwen3-Coder-Next 80B-A3B · Qwen3-Coder 30B-A3B · Qwen3-Coder 480B-A35B · DeepSeek V4 Flash Vision Exp · Qwen3.8 2.4T-A95B · Ornith 1.5 397B · Ornith 1.5 35B-A3B · Ornith 1.5 9B · Atria Dawn Preview · Intern S2 397B · Clef · Clef Flash · D1 3B · Humanizer · JEV 27B VL · Mellum2.1 12B-A2.5B · LightOnOCR-3 4B · Spark-X2.5 4B · Agnes-3.0-Qwen

Estimates, not guarantees: computed from the official config.json with the same engine as the LLM VRAM Calculator. Real usage depends on your engine version and settings.