How Many AI Avatars Can One GPU Handle? Real-World Test Reveals 4 Avatars at ¥7,600 Each per Month

📝 Originally published (in Japanese) at forge.workstyle.tech . Building an Unmanned System for 3D Avatar Live Streaming We're developing an unmanned system where 3D avatars automatically handle live streaming. The system boots up a cloud GPU pod at the scheduled start time, the renderer assembles and streams the video, and then the pod is discarded when the segment ends. Since there's no human oversight, three factors directly impact the success of the business and service quality: "how many avatars can run simultaneously," "how the system recovers from failures," and "how quickly it starts up." These questions couldn't be answered through estimates alone. Renting a GPU for a few hours costs only a few hundred yen. In this article, we'll share three stories of how we measured and designed the system, following the structure of "stumbling block → cause → solution." Capacity : How many avatars can run on a single GPU? The answer is 4, at a monthly cost of ¥7,600 per avatar. However, the bottleneck wasn't the GPU. Reliability : Despite using the same image, some hosts crashed every 60 seconds. We implemented a mechanism to automatically switch to a different host. Startup Speed : Reduced the time from pod startup to streaming start from 4 minutes to 95 seconds. These three aspects seem independent but are actually interconnected. Faster startup enabled practical host switching, and understanding capacity allowed us to set prices. Let's dive into each one. 1. How Many Avatars Can Run on a Single GPU? - Measured Result: 4 The first number we desperately needed was "how many avatars can run on a single GPU." Without this, we couldn't determine pricing, and without pricing, we couldn't assess the business viability. Estimates were useless, so we measured it. Here are the results: Item Measured Value GPU RTX 4000 Ada (Community type, $0.28/hour) Simultaneous Streams 4 avatars maintaining 720p30 in real-time (Recorded segment: 89 seconds / 89 seconds) GPU Usage 26% Bottlenec