The AI models can run on a CPU; however, they perform significantly better on a GPU. Therefore, we strongly recommend running these models on a computer equipped with a GPU for optimal performance.
At ECMWF, we use a node with a NVIDIA A100 card for making predictions with ai-models. The NVIDIA A100 card has 40Gb of GPU ram.
A 10-day forecast can take several hours on a CPU but only around one minute on a modern GPU.