Disclosed are aspects of memory-aware placement in systems that include graphics processing units (GPUs) that are virtual GPU (vGPU) enabled. In some examples, graphics processing units (GPU) are identified in a computing environment. Graphics processing requests are received. A graphics processing request includes a GPU memory requirement. The graphics processing requests are processed using a graphics processing request placement model that minimizes a number of utilized GPUs that are utilized to accommodate the requests. Virtual GPUs (vGPUs) are created to accommodate the graphics processing requests according to the graphics processing request placement model. The utilized GPUs divide their GPU memories to provide a subset of the plurality of vGPUs.