Running local LLMs on your NPU from R with Foundry Local and ellmer

A walkthrough on running local LLMs on a Surface Pro 11's Neural Processing Unit (NPU) using Microsoft's Foundry Local and the R ellmer package. Since Ollama and LM Studio don't natively support NPU inference, the author adapted Microsoft's Python getting-started guide into R code. The solution starts the Foundry service, downloads and loads a model (Qwen2.5-0.5B), discovers the dynamic endpoint, resolves the model ID via the REST API, and connects ellmer's chat_openai_compatible to the local OpenAI-compatible endpoint to send prompts.

Source: https://www.r-bloggers.com/2026/06/running-local-llms-on-your-npu-from-r-with-foundry-local-and-ellmer. 8 Sync News only summarizes and links out; content copyright belongs to the authors and original sources.