DevOps Engineer Squeezes 26B-Parameter MoE Model onto AWS's Cheapest Inferentia2 Instance

A developer ported Google's Gemma-4 26B-parameter MoE model to run on a single AWS inf2.xlarge instance at $0.76/hr, an 8.6x cost reduction from the original 24xlarge deployment. The feat required int8 quantization of experts and custom memory management to fit within 32 GB HBM and 16 GB host RAM. The approach demonstrates that large MoE models can be hosted affordably for single-user inference without sacrificing accuracy.