Can I run DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B on a Mac with 128 GB?

Yes

Its published weights (65.5 GB) fit in the 96.0 GB a Mac with 128 GB can use, with room for ≈ 114K tokens of context.

Full analysis of DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B Everything that runs on Mac with 128 GB Get the weights on Hugging Face

hf download deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B

Files and context on Mac with 128 GB

Each file of DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B (and of GGUF versions the site has analyzed), and how much context fits next to it, with the context cache in 16-bit or 8-bit.

File	Size	On Mac with 128 GB	Context (16-bit)	Context (8-bit)
As published	65.5 GB	Fits	114K	128K
4-bit (estimate)	18.4 GB	Fits	128K	128K

DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B on other hardware

NVIDIA H100Yes, just
RTX 5090Probably, at 4-bit
RTX 4090Probably, at 4-bit
RTX 3090Probably, at 4-bit
RTX 5060 Ti 16 GBNo
RTX 3060 12 GBNo
RTX 4060No
Mac with 32 GBProbably, at 4-bit
Mac with 64 GBProbably, at 4-bit
Mac with 128 GBYes

Popular models that run on Mac with 128 GB

Qwen3-0.6BQwen · 752M
Qwen3-VL-8B-InstructQwen · 8.77B
gpt2openai-community · 137M
Qwen3-8BQwen · 8.19B
Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct-GGUFunsloth · 30.5B
gemma-4-26B-A4B-itgoogle · 25.8B
Qwen2.5-7B-InstructQwen · 7.62B
Qwen3.5-9BQwen · 9.65B

Assumes 75% of the Mac's memory is usable (macOS's default limit for the GPU; it can be raised) and at least 4K tokens of context for one conversation, with the context cache in 16-bit unless noted. Fits leaves at least 20% of that memory for context; Tight leaves less.