TextDense13B params4K max context

OLMo 2 13B VRAM Requirements: How Many GPUs & What It Costs

OLMo 2 13B needs 26.0 GB of VRAM for its weights at FP16 — 26.7 GB once a KV cache is loaded. Below is the full breakdown: which GPUs fit, how many you need, what it serves, and what it costs per million tokens. Every figure comes from tokcalc's open-source capacity model.

Weights (FP16)
26.0 GB
26.7 GB with KV cache
Fits on 1 GPU?
Yes
A100 40GB SXM4 or larger
Cheapest config
$0.0717
4× RTX 3080 10GB / 1M tokens
Fastest config
6000
tok/s on 1× Cerebras CS-3 (WSE-3)
VRAM requirement by quantization
Weight footprint = params × bytes per param. The “with KV cache” column adds one request at 4K context.
QuantizationWeightsWith KV cacheSmallest single GPU
FP16recommended26.0 GB26.7 GBV100 SXM2 32GB (32 GB)
FP8 (E4M3)13.0 GB13.7 GBT4 16GB (16 GB)
AWQ 4-bit7.2 GB7.8 GBRTX 3080 10GB (10 GB)
Which GPU should you use?
Reference workload: 8K context, 8 concurrent users, continuous batching, FP16. Ranked by fitting first, then by tokens per dollar-hour.
GPUGPUsTotal VRAMDecode tok/sAggregate tok/sCost / 1M tokens
RTX 3080 10GB4×40 GB64.603101$0.0717
RTX 4080 16GB4×64 GB60.952925$0.1139
RTX 3090 24GB2×48 GB39.78954.7$0.1455
RTX 5090 32GB2×64 GB76.161828$0.1520
T4 16GB4×64 GB27.201306$0.1702
RTX A4000 16GB4×64 GB38.081828$0.1824
RTX 4090 24GB2×48 GB42.841028$0.2161
V100 SXM2 32GB2×64 GB38.25918.0$0.3026
A10G 24GB2×48 GB25.50612.0$0.3268
AMD MI300X 192GB1×192 GB132.51590$0.4368
TPU v6e Trillium (32GB)2×64 GB34.81835.4$0.5320
A100 40GB SXM41×40 GB38.75465.0$0.5376

RTX 3080 10GB has no NVLink, so 4-way tensor parallelism runs over PCIe. tokcalc applies a flat 0.85× multi-GPU efficiency factor for this, which is realistic for NVLink-equipped datacenter cards but optimistic for PCIe scale-out — treat the throughput and cost figures for this configuration as an upper bound, and measure before committing.

How concurrency changes with context length
On 4× RTX 3080 10GB at FP16. KV cache scales linearly with context, so long contexts cut the number of users you can serve from the same GPUs.
ContextConcurrent usersKV per requestFits?
4K20687.2 MB✓ fits
8K101.34 GB✓ fits
33K25.37 GB✓ fits
66K110.74 GB✓ fits
131K021.47 GB✗ does not fit
Frequently asked questions

Can OLMo 2 13B run on a single GPU?

Yes. At FP16 the model needs 26.7 GB of VRAM, so it fits on a single A100 40GB SXM4 or anything with more VRAM. At full FP16 it needs 26.7 GB, which fits on one V100 SXM2 32GB or larger.

How many GPUs does OLMo 2 13B need?

At FP16 with 8,192-token context and 8 concurrent users, the cheapest configuration that fits is 4× RTX 3080 10GB (40 GB total VRAM). $0.0717 per 1M output tokens.

How fast can OLMo 2 13B be served?

On 1× Cerebras CS-3 (WSE-3) at FP16, the aggregate throughput is 6000 tokens/sec with continuous batching. That hardware has no published rental price, so its cost per million tokens is not comparable.

How much VRAM does OLMo 2 13B need?

Weights alone: 26.0 GB at FP16, 26.0 GB at FP16. Add KV cache for your context length and concurrency — every concurrent request at 8,192 tokens costs extra VRAM, so budget headroom above the weight figure.

Is it cheaper to self-host OLMo 2 13B than to call an API?

At 4× RTX 3080 10GB the marginal cost is $0.0717 per 1M output tokens, before you add idle capacity, ops staff, or egress. That is typically cheaper than frontier API pricing at sustained volume, but API calls win when your load is bursty or too small to keep a GPU busy. The Build vs Buy tab on tokcalc prices this against a specific provider for you.

Try OLMo 2 13B with your own context and concurrency

The calculator uses the exact same formulas as this page — change the workload and watch every number update.

Open in calculator
Model architecture
The numbers behind the KV-cache and throughput math.
Total parameters13.00B
Active parameters per token13.00B
ArchitectureDense
Attention layoutFull attention (GQA)
Transformer layers40
Hidden dimension5120
Attention heads40 query / 8 KV (GQA)
Head dimension128
Vocabulary size50,281
Max context (catalog)4K
KV cache per token @ 8K160.0 KB

Every layer caches keys and values for the whole context, so the KV cache grows linearly with conversation length.