# Hardware requirements

If you want to run a validator node, you will first need a machine that is powerful enough to facilitate all of the required computation. We understand that for practical reasons a lot of the validators will choose one of the cloud providers. That said, the best thing from a decentralization standpoint is to run the node on your own machine.

A general remark for choosing your hardware setup is that you want the machine to have fast I/O. As such, NVMe SSD disks are recommended, as well as making sure that the network has low latency and is reliable.

Below you will find a reasonably powerful setup that should allow you to run your node comfortably, without worrying about the 'hiccups' (which can impede block production). 

#### Hardware setup for running on your own machine

* **CPU:** modern desktop x86\_64 (Intel, AMD) processor with at least 8 cores
* **RAM:**  32GB
* **Storage:**
  * **Pruned node** (recommended for validators) 500GB NVMe SSD
  * **Archive node** (required for RPC nodes): 2TB NVMe SSD
* **Network:** 100+Mbps (with low latency)

#### Example Cloud setup on AWS: 

We recommend instances equivalent or higher than **c5d.4xlarge** with **gp3 EBS** set to **16000 IOPS**.  For better disk performance setups with **NVMe Local Instances** are recommended over **EBS**.

A closing remark would be that while most of the times you could get away with using slightly less powerful machines, it becomes a gamble that validators usually want no part of.