How to Get a Free GPU for AI

You can run AI notebooks and demos on a free GPU without a credit card. Kaggle gives every verified account a weekly GPU and TPU quota in hosted Jupyter notebooks, and Hugging Face ZeroGPU gives a few free GPU minutes a day for running or hosting Gradio demos. Google Colab also has a free tier, with limits it does not publish. The free GPU quota tracker compares every allowance and works out the hours you have left this week.

What you get

Kaggle notebooks (Kaggle free GPU and TPU)

• GPU: up to 30 hours per week, which Kaggle says is sometimes higher depending on demand. The quota resets weekly.
• TPU: up to 20 hours per week, with a maximum of 9 hours in one session.
• Sessions: up to 12 hours of execution for CPU and GPU notebooks, 9 hours for TPU notebooks.
• Hardware: one NVIDIA Tesla P100 or two NVIDIA T4 GPUs, with 4 CPU cores and 29 GB of RAM, plus 20 GB of saved disk in /kaggle/working.

Hugging Face ZeroGPU (ZeroGPU Spaces)

• Running ZeroGPU Spaces: 2 minutes of GPU per day without logging in, 5 minutes per day with a free account. The quota resets 24 hours after your first GPU use.
• Hosting: free accounts in good standing (verified email, older than 30 days) can host up to 2 ZeroGPU Spaces.
• Hardware: a half NVIDIA RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell slice (48 GB) by default, or a full card (96 GB) at twice the quota cost.

Google Colab (free tier): free notebooks with heavily restricted GPU access and dynamic usage limits. Runtimes last up to 12 hours depending on availability, and resources are not guaranteed.

Steps

Kaggle

1. Create a free account at kaggle.com.
2. In your account settings, verify your phone number. Kaggle gates accelerators behind a verified account; TPUs also require a one-time identity verification through Persona, started from the same settings page.
3. Go to kaggle.com/code and create a new notebook.
4. Open the Settings pane in the notebook editor and choose a GPU or TPU under Accelerator. The session restarts with the accelerator attached.
5. For long jobs, use Save & Run All so the notebook runs in a background session.
6. Turn the accelerator off when you don't need it and stop sessions before closing the tab; idle sessions keep using quota until they time out.

Hugging Face ZeroGPU

1. Create a free account at huggingface.co and verify your email.
2. To use a GPU right away, open an existing ZeroGPU Space and run it.
3. To host your own (once your account is 30+ days old), create a Space with the Gradio SDK and select ZeroGPU hardware in the Space settings. ZeroGPU is the only free way to host a Gradio Space: on a free account, Gradio and Docker Spaces on CPU now "require a paid plan to create" (PRO), and only Static Spaces are "free for everyone".
4. In your app, import spaces and decorate GPU functions with @spaces.GPU. Load your model onto cuda at module level, not inside the decorated function.

Limits and the catch

• Kaggle's free accelerators are shared, so you may wait in a queue at busy times. Kaggle notebooks are best for training and experiments, not for serving an app.
• Five ZeroGPU minutes a day is enough to try demos, not to train. Each call defaults to a 60-second GPU window, extendable with @spaces.GPU(duration=...).
• ZeroGPU works only with the Gradio SDK (version 4+) and PyTorch 2.8 or later. torch.compile is not supported; use ahead-of-time compilation instead.
• Colab does not publish its free limits, and they change over time.
• Hugging Face Spaces outside ZeroGPU are no longer free to create: CPU Basic hardware has no hourly cost, but a new or duplicated Gradio or Docker Space needs PRO ($9 a month). The free Hugging Face inference guide covers what a free account still gets.

If it doesn't work

• Kaggle accelerator options are greyed out: finish phone verification in your account settings, and identity verification for TPUs. Check that you have weekly quota left.
• Kaggle session stuck starting: free GPUs and TPUs may be queued; wait or try the other GPU type.
• ZeroGPU says your quota is used up: wait until 24 hours after your first GPU use that day, or log in if you weren't signed in (5 minutes instead of 2).
• You can't select ZeroGPU hardware: your account must have a verified email and be older than 30 days, and you can host at most 2 ZeroGPU Spaces.