What It Really Costs To Run AI Locally
The $112,000 machine, the $565 power bill, and the reason the whole thing still runs at one token every ten seconds
The short version
You cannot run Claude on your own hardware. Anthropic has never published open weights for any Claude model, so Opus 5 is not a price question, it is simply unavailable. What people actually mean when they say "run it locally" is running the nearest open-weight equivalent, and as of July 2026 that is Moonshot AI's Kimi K3.
This guide prices that machine honestly, top to bottom, with a source on every number. Then it explains the part that makes most of the spending pointless, which is not the money and is not the GPU.
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