Run gpt-oss-20b (MoE) on a VPS.
September 2026 · 138 of 280 plans fit · re-ranked daily
OpenAI's open-weight reasoner ships in MXFP4: ~13 GB on disk, 3.6B active, adjustable reasoning effort. Fits a 16 GB VPS. On a CPU-only VPS it needs about 14 GB of RAM: 12.1 GB of weights in the model's native format, 410 MB of KV cache for an 8,192-token context and 1.5 GB for the OS and runtime. 138 of the 280 plans in our index fit; the cheapest comfortable pick is Contabo's Cloud VPS 8 · 8 vCPU · 24 GB at $16.27/mo, streaming an estimated 4.4–8.7 tok/s.
RAM needed · CPU inference
14 GB
- weights · native format
- 12.1 GB
- KV cache · 8K context
- 410 MB
- OS + runtime headroom
- 1.5 GB
Model card
- Size
- 21B total · 3.6B active
- Context
- 128K tokens
- Kind
- reasoning
- Released
- 2025-08
- License
- Apache-2.0
Facts fetched from Hugging Face on 3 Sept 2026: exact GGUF file sizes, KV geometry from the GGUF header · 6,519,052 downloads.
Best VPS plans for gpt-oss-20b (MoE)
ranked by estimated tokens/s per dollar, comfortable fits first
- 1runs comfortably~4.4–8.7 tok/s$16.27/mo
- 2runs comfortably~8.2–16 tok/s$38.99/mo
- 3runs comfortably~5.4–11 tok/s$29.05/mo
- 4runs comfortably~5.4–11 tok/s$31.66/mo
- 5runs comfortably~5.4–11 tok/s$34.27/mo
- 6runs comfortably~4.4–8.7 tok/s$27.50/mo
Speed = effective memory bandwidth ÷ active weight bytes (4 GB/s per shared vCPU, 6 per dedicated, ×0.5 for MoE routing overhead), shown as a band. Real numbers depend on the host CPU generation, AVX-512/AMX support and how noisy the neighbours are — treat these as order-of-magnitude.
Or buy hardware · 13 reference machines fit
all machines →- Raspberry Pi 5 (16 GB)16 GB · 17 GB/s · ~1–1.6 tok/s$305= 19 mo of VPS
- GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16 GB (card only)16 GB · 448 GB/s · ~53–82 tok/s$805*= 50 mo of VPS
- GeForce RTX 5070 Ti 16 GB (card only)16 GB · 896 GB/s · ~100+ tok/s$1,100*= 68 mo of VPS
- Mac mini (M6, 32 GB)32 GB · 153 GB/s · ~18–28 tok/s$1,299= 80 mo of VPS
- GeForce RTX 5080 16 GB (card only)16 GB · 960 GB/s · ~100+ tok/s$1,500*= 92 mo of VPS
- Mac mini (M5 Pro, 24 GB)24 GB · 307 GB/s · ~37–56 tok/s$1,699= 104 mo of VPS
Buy · per month
$8.78
$8.47 hardware + $0.31 power
Rent · per month
$16.27
Contabo Cloud VPS 8 · 8 vCPU · 24 GB
Break-even
The Raspberry Pi 5 (16 GB) pays for itself after 19 months of replacing the VPS — and it streams an estimated 1–1.6 tok/s against the VPS's CPU-only pace.
* approximate: August 2026 US retail median rather than list price. Local speed = peak bandwidth × 0.7 efficiency (0.35 on CPU-only boards) ÷ active weight bytes; unified-memory machines are assumed to give models 75% of their RAM. GPU cards need a host PC that is not included in the price.
Frequently asked
- How much RAM does gpt-oss-20b (MoE) need?
- About 14 GB for CPU inference at Q4_K_M: 12.1 GB of weights, 410 MB of KV cache at 8,192 tokens of context, and 1.5 GB of headroom. Longer contexts need more KV cache (48 KB per token for this model).
- What is the cheapest VPS that can run gpt-oss-20b (MoE)?
- Contabo Cloud VPS 8 · 8 vCPU · 24 GB (24 GB RAM, 8 vCPU) at $16.27/mo excl. VAT runs it comfortably as of 5 Sept 2026.
- How fast will gpt-oss-20b (MoE) run on a VPS without a GPU?
- Roughly 4.4–8.7 tok/s on the top pick. Token generation is bound by memory bandwidth — each token streams the active-expert weights once — so more and dedicated vCPUs help; a GPU or Apple-silicon machine is 10–50× faster.