Using TEI locally with GPU

You can install text-embeddings-inference locally to run it on your own machine with a GPU. To make sure that your hardware is supported, check out the Supported models and hardware page.

Step 1: CUDA and NVIDIA drivers

Make sure you have CUDA and the NVIDIA drivers installed - NVIDIA drivers on your device need to be compatible with CUDA version 12.2 or higher.

Add the NVIDIA binaries to your path:

export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/cuda/bin

Step 2: Install Rust

Install Rust on your machine by run the following in your terminal, then following the instructions:

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh

Step 3: Install necessary packages

This step can take a while as we need to compile a lot of CUDA kernels.

For Turing GPUs (T4, RTX 2000 series … )

cargo install --path router -F candle-cuda-turing

For Ampere, Ada Lovelace, Hopper, and Blackwell

cargo install --path router -F candle-cuda

Step 4: Launch Text Embeddings Inference

You can now launch Text Embeddings Inference on GPU with:

model=Qwen/Qwen3-Embedding-0.6B

text-embeddings-router --model-id $model --dtype float16 --port 8080