An analysis of DGX Spark ownership: when it makes sense
Intense Analytics · AI Hardware An analysis of DGX Spark ownership: when it makes sense When a DGX Spark beats renting an H100, and when it doesn't. By Tejas Patel · intenseanalytics.com Every few weeks someone asks me whether they should buy an NVIDIA DGX Spark or just rent H100s in the cloud. It sounds like a spec-sheet question, one box against one card. It isn't. The real decision underneath it is older and simpler: should you own your AI compute, or rent it. The DGX Spark is the cleanest case for owning. A cloud H100 is the cleanest case for renting. Frame it that way, and the choice mostly makes itself. Here is the whole article in one idea, and then the scenarios. First: you probably don't need full fine-tuning The most expensive assumption in this whole decision is that you need a full fine-tune. You usually don't. QLoRA , a parameter-efficient method, adapts a 70B model on a single GPU by training small adapters on top of a frozen 4-bit base...