NVIDIA L40S: Local AI & Business Fit
A versatile 48GB datacenter card for inference and graphics — a popular, cost-effective cloud and on-prem serving option.
Here’s what the NVIDIA L40S means for a business that wants to run private AI on hardware it controls: which open LLMs fit, which agents it can power, the AI Business OS tier it suits, and whether to run local, cloud or hybrid.
Specs at a glance
- Memory
- 48 GB
- Memory type
- GDDR6 ECC
- Bandwidth
- 864 GB/s
- Approx FP16
- 362 TFLOPS
- Architecture
- Ada Lovelace
- Process
- TSMC 4N
- Power
- 350 W
- Launch year
- 2023
Specs are approximate figures. GDDR6 (not HBM) keeps cost and power down at the expense of bandwidth. Strong fit for medium-scale inference fleets. Tensor TFLOPS approximate.
AI compatibility scores
Transparent 0–100 heuristics blending usable memory, bandwidth and compute — relative guidance, not benchmarks.
Compatible LLMs
Open-weight chat, coding and reasoning models from our catalog graded for the NVIDIA L40S, best fit first.
- Mixtral 8x7B (MoE)Mistral · 47B · Apache-2.0
Fits at Q4_K_M (~28GB) with ~14.2GB headroom — about 1 concurrent instance.
Q4_K_M · ~28GBRuns well - CodeLlama 34BCodeLlama · 34B · Llama Community License
Fits at Q8_0 (~37GB) with ~5.2GB headroom — about 1 concurrent instance.
Q8_0 · ~37GBRuns well - Qwen2.5 32BQwen · 32B · Apache-2.0
Fits at Q8_0 (~34GB) with ~8.2GB headroom — about 1 concurrent instance.
Q8_0 · ~34GBRuns well - Qwen3 32BQwen · 32B · Apache-2.0
Fits at Q8_0 (~34GB) with ~8.2GB headroom — about 1 concurrent instance.
Q8_0 · ~34GBRuns well - DeepSeek-R1 Distill 32BDeepSeek · 32B · MIT
Fits at Q8_0 (~34GB) with ~8.2GB headroom — about 1 concurrent instance.
Q8_0 · ~34GBRuns well - Qwen2.5-Coder 32BQwen · 32B · Apache-2.0
Fits at Q8_0 (~34GB) with ~8.2GB headroom — about 1 concurrent instance.
Q8_0 · ~34GBRuns well - Gemma 2 27BGemma · 27B · Gemma Terms of Use
Fits at Q8_0 (~29GB) with ~13.2GB headroom — about 1 concurrent instance.
Q8_0 · ~29GBRuns well - Gemma 3 27BGemma 3 · 27B · Gemma Terms of Use
Fits at Q8_0 (~29GB) with ~13.2GB headroom — about 1 concurrent instance.
Q8_0 · ~29GBRuns well
Best models by business workload
Best for coding agents
Code completion, review and refactoring on private source.
- CodeLlama 34BRuns well
- Qwen2.5 32BRuns well
- Qwen3 32BRuns well
Best for RAG / search
Answering over your documents with citations.
- Mixtral 8x7B (MoE)Runs well
- Qwen2.5 32BRuns well
- Qwen3 32BRuns well
Best for business automation
Document extraction and back-office workflows.
- Gemma 2 27BRuns well
- Gemma 3 27BRuns well
- Mistral Small 24BRuns well
Good for a private AI Business OS?
Yes — this is a viable private AI Business OS host for a small-team deployment, running models like Mixtral 8x7B (MoE) on hardware you control.
Upgrade tip: For larger models, longer context or more concurrent agents, move up to a 24-48GB card, a multi-GPU workstation, or burst to the cloud.
Headline model it can host: Mixtral 8x7B (MoE).
Where it falls short
- ▸No major limitations for typical local AI workloads at this tier.
Business agents that make sense
How this machine fits the core AI Business OS agent archetypes:
- Strong fitCustomer Support Agent
Answers customers over your docs, drafts replies, triages tickets.
- Strong fitDocument / RAG Agent
Reads contracts, reports and wikis and answers with citations.
- CapableLegal Evidence Agent (DocMatch-style)
Searches case files and exhibits to surface and link evidence.
- Strong fitHotel / Hospitality Agent
Handles guest messaging, bookings and front-desk automation.
- CapableAccounting / Odoo Agent
Extracts invoices, reconciles data and drives ERP workflows.
- CapableCoding / Product Engineering Agent
Local code completion, review and refactoring on private source.
- Cloud-assistFounder Ops / Business Command Center
A fleet of cooperating agents running the whole business privately.
“Cloud-assist” means run it locally for light loads and burst to the cloud for heavier jobs. See business use cases for how each agent maps to hardware.
Frequently asked questions
Is the NVIDIA L40S good for running local AI?+
It scores 59/100 on our Local AI Score (Capable tier), based on its 48GB of memory and available bandwidth/compute. That makes it suited to the Pro AI Business OS tier.
Which LLMs can the NVIDIA L40S run?+
Comfortably: Llama 3.1 70B (Q4_K_M), Llama 3.3 70B (Q4_K_M), DeepSeek-R1 Distill Llama 70B (Q4_K_M). Larger models may run with heavier quantization or by splitting across devices.
Should I run AI locally or in the cloud on the NVIDIA L40S?+
A hybrid approach is recommended. Strong enough for everyday local agents, but offload occasional large-model or high-concurrency jobs to the cloud.
Can I turn the NVIDIA L40S into a private AI Business OS?+
Yes. AI Business OS can run on this machine at the Pro tier, giving you private agents on your own hardware. See the call-to-action above to get started.
Turn the NVIDIA L40S into a private AI Business OS
Run your own AI agents on hardware you control — private by design, no per-seat data leaving your premises. BrainOutput helps you pick the right machine and turn it into a working AI Business OS.
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