Google's new Gemma 4 12B model is designed to run on any laptop with 16GB of RAM

Google released the Gemma 4 12B model, a new AI language model designed to run on consumer laptops with 16GB of RAM. The 12-billion-parameter model fills a gap in the Gemma 4 family between mobile-optimized versions and larger, more resource-intensive models. Google claims the new model offers near-equivalent performance to the larger Gemma 4 26B MoE while requiring roughly half the memory.

The generative AI boom has driven the cost of memory into the stratosphere, and Google is a key part of that trend. So it’s only fitting that Google should offer some less RAM-hungry local AI models. The company has announced the release of a new Gemma 4 model https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/developers-tools/introducing-gemma-4-12B/ that fills a gap in the lineup that launched earlier this year. The new model is efficient enough that you may be able to run it on a pretty average consumer laptop. In April, Google released four models in the Gemma 4 family https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/04/google-announces-gemma-4-open-ai-models-switches-to-apache-2-0-license/ , which also marked the shift to a more open Apache 2.0 license. The initial models included two mobile-optimized options E2B and E4B along with a pair of models for more serious work 26B Mixture of Experts and 31B Dense . That left a rather large unserved space in the middle, which is right where the new model falls. Gemma 4 12B is considerably more capable than the mobile versions, but it won’t require a $20,000 AI accelerator to run locally. Google says Gemma 4 12B is unique in that it can run on many consumer laptops without sacrificing quality. As long as you’ve got a computer with 16GB of system RAM or VRAM, the 12-billion-parameter model will work. That’s about half the total memory footprint of Gemma 4 26B MoE, and Google claims the new model is almost as capable, at least as far as benchmarks go.