Run Qwen3 30B-A3B (MoE) on a VPS.
Prices checked
The cheapest VPS that runs Qwen3 30B-A3B (MoE) is Leaseweb VPS 4 at $26.13 a month, with 48 GB of RAM for the 20.9 GB it needs, checked .
Best plans for Qwen3 30B-A3B (MoE)
Most tokens per second for your money, comfortable fits first.
- 1
VPS 4 · 12 vCPU / 48 GB · Europe
Leaseweb · 12C · 48 GB · ~6–12 tok/s$26.13/mo - 2
VPS 4 · 12 vCPU / 48 GB · US
Leaseweb · 12C · 48 GB · ~6–12 tok/s$31.49/mo - 3
VPS 4 · 12 vCPU / 48 GB · UK
Leaseweb · 12C · 48 GB · ~6–12 tok/s$32.55/mo - 4$32.95/mo
- 5
VPS 5 · 16 vCPU / 64 GB · Europe
Leaseweb · 16C · 64 GB · ~6–12 tok/s$34.18/mo - 6
VPS 4 · 12 vCPU / 48 GB · Singapore
Leaseweb · 12C · 48 GB · ~6–12 tok/s$39.95/mo
Hetzner · 16C · 32 GB · ~6–12 tok/sWhat it needs
RAM needed
20.9 GB
CPU inference at Q4_K_M
Weights
18.6 GB
Q4_K_M
KV cache
819 MB
8K context
OS and runtime
1.5 GB
headroom
The CPU darling: 30B of knowledge, 3B active per token, so it streams like a small model on a 24–32 GB VPS.
- Size
- 31B total · 3.3B active
- Context
- 40K tokens
- Kind
- chat
- Released
- 2025-04
- License
- Apache-2.0
Facts from Hugging Face: exact GGUF file sizes, KV geometry from the GGUF header, 965,266 downloads.
Or rent a GPU
every GPU price1 provider rents the RTX A5000, with 24 GB of GPU memory against the 20.9 GB Qwen3 30B-A3B (MoE) needs.
Cheapest board that fits
RTX A5000
24 GB of GPU memory
On demand
$0.16per GPU an hour
RunPod
Held for a month
$116.80
730 hours of RTX A5000 · Community Cloud
Or buy hardware
all machines8 reference machines fit Qwen3 30B-A3B (MoE).
Mac mini (M6, 32 GB)
32 GB · 153 GB/s · ~20–31 tok/s
$1,299= 50 mo of VPSFramework Desktop (Ryzen AI Max+ 395, 64 GB)
Approximate64 GB · 256 GB/s · ~34–52 tok/s
$1,959= 75 mo of VPSMac mini (M5 Pro, 64 GB)
64 GB · 307 GB/s · ~40–62 tok/s
$2,299= 88 mo of VPSMac Studio (M5 Max, 36 GB)
36 GB · 460 GB/s · ~60–93 tok/s
$2,499= 96 mo of VPSGeForce RTX 5090 32 GB (card only)
Approximate32 GB · 1792 GB/s · ~100+ tok/s
$3,440= 10+ yrs of VPSFramework Desktop (Ryzen AI Max+ 395, 128 GB)
Approximate128 GB · 256 GB/s · ~34–52 tok/s
$3,449= 10+ yrs of VPS
Buy · per month
$37.45
$36.08 hardware + $1.36 power
Rent · per month
$26.13
Leaseweb VPS 4 · 12 vCPU / 48 GB · Europe
Break-even
The Mac mini (M6, 32 GB) pays for itself after 52 months of replacing the VPS, and it streams an estimated 20–31 tok/s against the VPS's CPU-only pace.
How we count
On a CPU-only VPS Qwen3 30B-A3B (MoE) needs about 20.9 GB of RAM: 18.6 GB of Q4_K_M weights, 819 MB of KV cache for an 8,192-token context and 1.5 GB for the OS and runtime. 93 of the 527 plans in the index fit and include a disk. A plan runs it comfortably with 20% headroom over the total, and is a tight fit with exactly enough.
Other quants: Q8_0 weights take 32.5 GB (near-lossless, about half of F16); F16 takes 61.1 GB.
The plans are ranked by estimated tokens per second per dollar, comfortable fits first. Speed is effective memory bandwidth divided by active weight bytes (4 GB/s per shared vCPU, 6 per dedicated, times 0.5 for MoE routing overhead), shown as a band. Real numbers depend on the host CPU generation, AVX-512 and AMX support and how noisy the neighbours are, so treat them as an order of magnitude.
A GPU rate is per GPU for an hour, and the monthly figure is 730 hours of the whole instance at it, tax excluded.
A machine tagged approximate is priced at the typical US street price in August 2026 rather than its maker's own price. Local speed is peak bandwidth times 0.7 efficiency (0.35 on CPU-only boards) divided by active weight bytes; unified-memory machines are assumed to give models 75% of their RAM. GPU cards need a host PC that is not in the price.
Frequently asked
- How much RAM does Qwen3 30B-A3B (MoE) need?
- About 20.9 GB for CPU inference at Q4_K_M: 18.6 GB of weights, 819 MB of KV cache at 8,192 tokens of context, and 1.5 GB of headroom. Longer contexts need more KV cache (96 KB per token for this model).
- What is the cheapest VPS that can run Qwen3 30B-A3B (MoE)?
- Leaseweb VPS 4 · 12 vCPU / 48 GB · Europe (48 GB RAM, 12 vCPU) at $26.13/mo excl. VAT runs it comfortably as of 31 Oct 2026. Leaseweb VPS 3 · 8 vCPU / 24 GB · Europe at $14.07/mo is a tight fit.
- How fast will Qwen3 30B-A3B (MoE) run on a VPS without a GPU?
- Roughly 6–12 tok/s on the top pick. Token generation is limited by memory bandwidth, because each new token reads the active experts' weights once. More vCPUs help, dedicated ones most, but a GPU or an Apple silicon machine is 10 to 50 times faster.
Same size class