Arrakis / Models / Kimi-K2-Instruct

Kimi-K2-Instruct GPU requirements

Kimi-K2-Instruct has 1.0T parameters. To serve it, plan for about 2,463 GB of GPU memory in 16-bit, 1,232 GB in 8-bit or 616 GB in 4-bit, including about 20% for the KV cache and activations.

It is a mixture of experts: 384 experts, 8 of them active for each token. All of them stay in GPU memory, so plan memory for all 1.0T parameters.

What it takes to serve it

GPU memory to run it for inference, with the smallest GPU setup that holds it and the lowest price on Arrakis right now.

PrecisionMemory and the smallest setup
16-bit2,463 GB: more than one 8-GPU machine
8-bit1,232 GB: 8 × B200, from $54.32 per hour for all 8
4-bit616 GB: 8 × H100, from $13.20 per hour for all 8

What it takes to fine-tune it

QLoRA trains adapters on a 4-bit frozen model, LoRA on a 16-bit one, and full fine-tuning updates every weight. Figures are before activations, which grow with batch size and sequence length.

MethodMemory and the smallest setup
QLoRA718 GB: 4 × B200, from $27.16 per hour for all 4
LoRA2,463 GB: more than one 8-GPU machine
Full fine-tuning16,423 GB: more than one 8-GPU machine

About the model

From its card and files on Hugging Face. Memory figures here follow the GPU memory guide.

Parameters
1.0T
Experts
384
Experts for each token
8
Context window (tokens)
131,072
Published in
FP8
License
other
Released
2025-07-11
Weights
moonshotai/Kimi-K2-Instruct

Deploy it on Arrakis

Open Models in the console, choose vLLM, SGLang or llama.cpp, and rent a GPU it fits on. You get an OpenAI-compatible endpoint with its own API key, and root SSH to the machine. Or run it yourself on any machine with enough GPU memory:

Questions

Live prices for every GPU are on the GPU prices page.

How much GPU memory does Kimi-K2-Instruct need?
To serve it, about 2,463 GB in 16-bit, 1,232 GB in 8-bit, 616 GB in 4-bit, including about 20% for the KV cache and activations. To fine-tune it, about 718 GB with QLoRA, 2,463 GB with LoRA and 16,423 GB for full fine-tuning with Adam, before activations.
Can I run Kimi-K2-Instruct on one GPU?
No. Even in 4-bit it needs about 616 GB: 8 H100 GPUs.
What does it cost to run Kimi-K2-Instruct?
In 16-bit it needs more than one 8-GPU machine; in 4-bit, 8 H100 GPUs. Each setup on this page shows the lowest price per GPU-hour on Arrakis right now, and you pay by the hour from a prepaid balance.
How do I deploy Kimi-K2-Instruct on Arrakis?
Open Models in the Arrakis console, paste moonshotai/Kimi-K2-Instruct, choose vLLM, SGLang or llama.cpp, and rent a GPU it fits on. You get an OpenAI-compatible endpoint with its own API key, and root SSH to the machine.