VPS for AI

Yes, but it depends on what you mean by "using AI". A normal VPS is very useful for keeping agents, automations or chatbots running that call a cloud AI, like Claude or OpenAI, because that needs hardly any power. What it isn't usually good for is running large models on the server itself: ordinary VPS don't come with a graphics card, and the ones that do cost quite a bit more.

It's the most common mix-up. Lots of people rent a VPS thinking they're going to have "their own AI" and find that the model, without a graphics card, answers at a snail's pace. It's worth separating two jobs: the one that thinks (the model) and the one that organises (the program that receives the requests, calls the model and does things with the answer). The second lives very happily on a modest VPS; the first can be in a provider's cloud or on a machine with a graphics card that you own.

I work with an internal network of 8 servers and 6 VPS outside, and not everything goes in the same place. What runs inside, what runs outside and how I decide where each thing goes I explain in "Why I have eight servers at home and six outside". If you just want to set up an agent or a chatbot, start with a simple VPS and leave the model's heavy lifting to the cloud.