Best Open Source LLMs for Edge Computing and IoT in 2026: Complete Deployment Guide
Edge computing and IoT applications have reached a critical inflection point in 2026—where running sophisticated language models locally on resource-constrained devices has become not just possible, but practical for production deployments. The best open source LLMs for edge computing combine sub-billion parameter counts with architectural innovations that deliver impressive performance within tight memory and power budgets. Leading models like Phi-4-mini (3.8B), Gemma 3 (270M-1B), SmolLM2 (135M-1.7B), and Qwen3 (0.5B-4B) represent a new generation of edge-optimized language models that can run efficiently on everything from Raspberry Pi devices to industrial IoT gateways. ...