Local AI in Japan

Hardware pricing in Japan

Used 3090s ~JPY 100,000. 4090s ~JPY 250,000. Mac Studios available.

Our note on this market reads: Premium pricing, strong Mac presence. Premium pricing shifts the calculation toward buying once: a card with more memory than you need today costs less than replacing an undersized one in a market where nothing is cheap.

GPU	Used 2026	New 2026
RTX 3090 (24GB)	~JPY 1,05,000	Rare new
RTX 4090 (24GB)	~JPY 2,40,000	~JPY 3,00,000
Mac Studio M4 Max (36GB)	—	~JPY 3,60,000

Converted from US dollar reference prices at approximate mid-2026 rates (JPY 150 to the dollar), then cross-checked against the local note above. Import duty, VAT and shipping are not included and are the largest source of error in several markets. Mac Studios typically have a single uniform global price.

Models trained for Japan

The catalogue records 2 models with training or evaluation specific to Japan or its languages. These are the entries worth trying before falling back to a general multilingual model:

• ELYZA-japanese-Llama-2
• Japanese-StableLM-Instruct-Alpha

Recommended setup for Japan

For most users in Japan, we recommend starting with a used RTX 3090 (24GB) at JPY 1,05,000, or a Mac Studio with M4 Max (36GB) at JPY 3,60,000 new. The full reasoning is in the hardware requirements guide and the RTX 3090 value writeup.