Kimi K2.6 on NVIDIA DGX H200 (8x H200, 1,128 GB)
1.0T (32B active) on 1,128 GB at 38,400 GB/s. Hardware details · Model details
Memory budget at 8K context
How the estimate is calculated
- Multi-GPU: 4800 GB/s per card, with each additional card contributing 90% of its bandwidth — 35040 GB/s effective, not the 38400 GB/s aggregate. NVSwitch / 4th-generation NVLink, 900 GB/s per GPU carries cross-GPU collectives.
- Decode: reading 32.0B active parameters at 4.85 bits/weight takes 0.71 ms at 35040 GB/s x 78% achieved efficiency.
- MoE routing penalty of 15% applied: expert gathers are less bandwidth-efficient than a dense sweep.
- Per-token overhead of 1.4 ms (kernel launches, attention bookkeeping, sampling) is significant here — this model is not purely bandwidth-bound on this hardware.
- Prefill: 15832 TFLOPS (FP16) x 2 for native FP8 tensor cores x 26% assumed model-FLOPs utilisation, divided by 2 x 181.3B parameters per token.
- Prefill uses 181.3B effective parameters, not the 32B active in decode: a batch of hundreds of tokens routes across most of the expert pool.
- MoE decode depends on how well the engine batches expert gathers; real results vary more than for dense models.
- With few active parameters on fast memory, fixed per-token overhead rather than bandwidth sets the ceiling. Real engines vary widely in how well they hide it.
- Prefill throughput is highly engine-dependent. Flash attention, batch size and quantized KV all move this number substantially, and for sparse mixture-of-experts models it is the least reliable figure we produce.
- This is a calculated estimate, not a measurement. It assumes a single request, a short prompt, no speculative decoding and a warm model already resident in memory.
Estimator version estimator_v1. Stored with every estimated row so old estimates can be regenerated when the model improves.
| Quantization | Weights | Total needed | Utilisation | Fit | Max context |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
MLX 4-bit | 559.5 GB | 580.6 GB | 58% | Comfortable | 256K |
Q4_K_Mrecommended | 597.2 GB | 619.4 GB | 62% | Comfortable | 256K |
Q8_0 | 1036.5 GB | 1071.9 GB | 108% | Does not fit | 0 |
The $100 comparison uses the Codex Pro 5x / Claude Max 5x plans. A fixed planning conversion is used for USD. This compares monthly spend only: subscriptions have usage limits, local hardware has different capabilities and constraints, and taxes or regional pricing may change the charged amount. Prices checked 7 September 2026.
Monthly breakdown
| Depreciation 316,298 over 5 years, straight-line to a 43,132 residual | $5,271.64 |
| Electricity 524.5 kWh/month at 0.140/kWh | $73.43 |
| Cost of capital 4.0%/yr on 201,281 average capital employed | $670.94 |
| Monthly cost before tax | $6,016.00 |
| Electricity tax shield Running costs are deductible business expenses | −$15.42 |
| First-year expensing §179 (100.0%) | −$1,258.00 |
| Monthly economic cost after tax | $4,742.58 |
Three different numbers, deliberately
Assumptions and sources (verified 2026-09-07)
- VAT rate: No US federal VAT · verified 2026-09-07
- Marginal tax rate: IRS Publication 542 — Corporations · verified 2026-09-07
- VAT recoverable fraction: site assumption · verified 2026-09-07
- Useful life: IRS Publication 946 — How To Depreciate Property · verified 2026-09-07
- Electricity price: Site assumption · verified 2026-09-07
| Hosted model | USD/1M output | Break-even | API at your volume | Verdict | Comparison type |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Qwen3.8 Flash Alibaba Cloud | $0.42 | 3,079.6M/mo | $87 | API cheaper | Different model |
| DeepSeek-V4.1 Flash DeepSeek | $0.60 | 2,634.8M/mo | $102 | API cheaper | Different model |
| DeepSeek-V4 Pro DeepSeek | $1.98 | 653.2M/mo | $412 | API cheaper | Different model |
| DeepSeek V4 Pro (Together) Together AI | $4.40 | 223.7M/mo | $1,202 | API cheaper | Different model |
| GLM-5.3 Z.ai | $4.40 | 304.0M/mo | $884 | API cheaper | Different model |
| Claude Haiku 4.5 Anthropic | $5.00 | 364.8M/mo | $737 | API cheaper | Different model |
| Hardware | Decode | Price | Fit |
|---|---|---|---|
| NVIDIA DGX Station GB300 (748 GB) | ~36.6–52.6 t/s | $90,082 * | Borderline |
Compare NVIDIA DGX H200 (8x H200, 1,128 GB) against NVIDIA DGX Station GB300 (748 GB) →
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