Why a business bought 4 DGX Sparks: OpenFaaS's month with them
OpenFaaS, a UK software company, has written up why it spent about £10,000 on four DGX Sparks: customer data it will not send to a cloud provider, and red teaming its own products. It also found two 4-bit builds of GLM 5.3 Flash running at different speeds, so two builds of the same model are not interchangeable.
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Corrected on 3 October 2026. In the video of 19 September I said NVIDIA had reportedly stopped making the original DGX Spark. NVIDIA has since answered that on its own forum and says more of them are in production. I said so in NVIDIA's 64GB DGX Spark at $4,999: what it runs.
OpenFaaS, a UK software company, has written up why it bought four DGX Sparks for the business. It puts the cost at about £10,000, and says it got about £600 of that back through Inception, NVIDIA's startup programme.
Why it bought them
It gives two reasons. The first is customer data it will not send to a cloud provider. Its customer support works from unredacted Kubernetes dumps, and it says that work has to stay local. The second is red teaming its own products, which cloud models tend to refuse.
What it did with them
OpenFaaS ran Qwen, DeepSeek and GLM 5.3 Flash against each other for a week across six private repositories. It says the contest found real vulnerabilities in its products, rated high, medium and low, and that it has since fixed them.
It clustered the four boxes without the network switch it had expected to buy, a MikroTik CRS804 at £1,500. It says it managed that by patching the NCCL library, which is how the machines talk to each other, so that boxes with no direct connection could route through the others.
It also found that NVIDIA's own 4-bit build of GLM 5.3 Flash reads prompts 20% faster than LibertAI's community build, and writes 7% slower. So two builds of the same model are not interchangeable.
One note on buying
For anyone pricing this up, OpenFaaS also wrote that NVIDIA was reportedly stopping production of the original DGX Spark, while other makers such as ASUS, Dell and MSI would keep supplying their own versions. It cited a page on Macnica's site for that.
Read more
- OpenFaaS's write-up of how and why it bought four DGX Sparksblog.alexellis.io
- The Macnica page the write-up cites for the production haltmacnica.co.jp
The numbers in this story
| Figure | What it is | From | Kind |
|---|---|---|---|
| about £10,000, about £600 back | What OpenFaaS paid for four DGX Sparks, and what it got back | blog.alexellis.io | an owner's report |
| £1,500 (MikroTik CRS804) | The network switch OpenFaaS did without | blog.alexellis.io | an owner's report |
| Reading 20% faster, writing 7% slower | NVIDIA's 4-bit build of GLM 5.3 Flash against LibertAI's | blog.alexellis.io | an owner's report |
If a number on this page is wrong, I would rather know. Tell me in the comments under the video and I will correct it here and pin the correction there. What has been corrected so far is on the corrections page.