MODEL · ALIBABA · 480B TOTAL / 35B ACTIVE
Qwen3-Coder-480B-A35B
Frontier open-weight agentic coding model — claimed on par with Claude Sonnet on agentic benchmarks. Alibaba's most powerful coder.
License: Apache 2.0 · Context: 262K native, extendable to 1M · Released: July 2025
The decision in five lines
- The call
- Hosted only
- Best for
- Hosted reference and benchmarks
- Runs on
- Hosted or workstation-class only · ~240 GB (not consumer-local)
- Watch out
- Anything local under a workstation-grade multi-GPU rig — at Q4 it's still ~240 GB.
- Evidence
- Estimated
- 480B total
- PARAMETERS
- MOE
- TYPE
- 262K
- CONTEXT
- ~240 GB (not consumer-local)
- VRAM AT Q4
Where we recommend this
This model isn’t currently in an active planner slot. See the runner notes below if you’re running it anyway.
The call
Frontier open-weight agentic coding model — claimed on par with Claude Sonnet on agentic benchmarks. Alibaba's most powerful coder.
When not to use: Anything local under a workstation-grade multi-GPU rig — at Q4 it's still ~240 GB. Practically a hosted/API or dual-server-class model.
Runner notes
MLX 4-bit build exists (`mlx-community/Qwen3-Coder-480B-A35B-Instruct-4bit`) for Mac Studio 512 GB. Otherwise FP8 on 8× H100 or hosted via Qwen Code / Cline. Function-call format is custom — use Qwen's template, not OpenAI's.
Next step
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