How Much GPU Memory Does the KV Cache Really Take?

We build the KV cache size formula one factor at a time, from single-head attention to multi-head, stacked layers and MQA/GQA, then check it against a real calculator: 13.73 GiB for 100,000 tokens on Qwen3-8B.

Date: November 2, 2026  |  Estimated Reading Time: 8 min  |  Author: Chi Zhang