How much VRAM does Mixtral 8x7B need?
Mistral · 47B params MoE · updated 2026-08-25
Headline answer
At bf16, reference 8K context, batch size 1: 98.6GB of VRAM. The smallest fitting configuration is 1× DGX Spark 128GB.
VRAM by quantization
| Dtype | VRAM | Fits on |
|---|---|---|
| bf16 | 98.6GB | 1× DGX Spark 128GB |
| fp8 | 52.8GB | 1× H100 PCIe 80GB |
| awq | 29.8GB | 1× RTX 5000 Ada 32GB |
| nvfp4 | 31.8GB | 1× L40 48GB |
Context length sensitivity
Same model, same bf16 dtype, batch size 1 — VRAM at longer context windows.
| Context | VRAM (bf16) |
|---|---|
| 8K | 98.6GB |
| 32K | 101.8GB |
Model facts
About Mixtral 8x7B
How much VRAM does an Mixtral 8x7B need? At bf16 — the reference precision, no quality loss — a reference 8K-context, batch-1 deployment needs 98.6GB, which is enough to tell you the smallest fitting configuration is 1× DGX Spark 128GB. That number comes straight out of our GPU calculator's architecture-aware model, the same path the interactive calculator uses, not a size-based estimate. Mixtral 8x7B is a Mistral model built from 47B total parameters, with only 12.9B active per token via mixture-of-experts routing, and most of that VRAM at batch size 1 is model weights rather than KV cache or runtime overhead — which is exactly why quantization moves the needle so much. Switching to fp8 cuts the weight footprint roughly in half; AWQ (weight-only int4) goes further, at some quality cost on harder tasks; and NVFP4 lands in a similar range to AWQ but with native throughput on Blackwell GPUs instead of an emulated dtype. The table above walks through all four options with the exact VRAM total and the smallest GPU configuration each one unlocks. Context length adds its own pressure on top of the weights: every additional token of context grows the KV cache, so a 128K-context deployment of this model needs meaningfully more headroom than the 8K reference case shown as the headline number — the context-sensitivity table breaks that out at 32K and 128K wherever this model's native window allows it.
Frequently asked questions
How much VRAM does Mixtral 8x7B need?
At bf16, reference 8K context and batch size 1, Mixtral 8x7B needs 98.6GB of VRAM. The smallest fitting configuration we find is 1× DGX Spark 128GB.
How many parameters does Mixtral 8x7B have?
Mixtral 8x7B has 47B total parameters, with 12.9B active per token via mixture-of-experts routing.
Does quantization reduce Mixtral 8x7B's VRAM requirement?
Yes — switching from bf16 to fp8 brings the total down to 52.8GB, and weight-only int4 formats (AWQ, NVFP4) go further still. See the per-dtype table above for exact numbers.
Where do these VRAM numbers come from?
They're computed by the same calculator engine behind our interactive GPU calculator, from the model's published architecture (layers, hidden size, attention heads, KV cache config) — not a generic per-parameter estimate.
Methodology: VRAM figures are computed by the same calculator engine behind our interactive GPU calculator, from Mixtral 8x7B's published architecture (layer count, hidden size, attention heads, KV cache configuration) — not a generic per-parameter estimate. Reference scenario: batch size 1, vLLM framework, fp16 KV cache. Page last updated 2026-08-25. These are engineering estimates, not a guarantee — always validate against your actual serving framework and workload before committing to hardware.
Size a full deployment — concurrency, framework, quantization — in the calculator →