What GPU do I need to run baidu/ERNIE-4.5-21B-A3B-Thinking?
21.8B parameters, published in BF16. View on Hugging Face
ERNIE-4.5-21B-A3B-Thinking is published by baidu on Hugging Face, with 18,021 downloads and 791 likes to date. It's a Ernie4_5_MoeForCausalLM model built for text-generation, published natively in BF16.
VRAM required & cheapest live GPU fit
Required VRAM = weight size at each precision, plus a fixed overhead for KV-cache, activations, and fragmentation. Full formula and assumptions: methodology.
A GPU is only matched to a row if its hardware supports that precision, and the primary recommendation is always a single-GPU fit when one exists.
INT4 caveat: requires a quantized checkpoint actually published for this model, check its Hugging Face page before relying on this row.
Cheapest way to run ERNIE-4.5-21B-A3B-Thinking at its published (BF16) precision: 1× A100 on runpod, at $1.19/hr per GPU ($1.19/hr total). Quantizing to FP8 or INT4 (rows above) can cost less, but requires a compatible quantized checkpoint to exist for this model.
Weight-to-VRAM math, the fit rules, and how live prices are normalized: full methodology.
More baidu models
- Unlimited-OCR (3.3B, BF16)
- ERNIE-4.5-21B-A3B-PT (21.9B, BF16)
- ERNIE-4.5-0.3B-PT (361M, BF16)
- Qwen3-0.6B (752M, BF16)
- gpt2 (137M, F32)
- Qwen3-8B (8.2B, BF16)
