// Kimi · Text LLM
Kimi-Linear-48B-A3B-Instruct: VRAM & local deployment
49.1B total · 3B active (MoE) parameters. About 33.3 GB at 4-bit and 109 GB at BF16 with one 8K-token request.
released 2025-10-30licence: Commercial OKmemory figures are estimates
01Specs
| Publisher | Moonshot AI · moonshotai |
|---|---|
| Family / series | Kimi · Kimi-Linear |
| Type | Text LLM (text-generation) |
| Parameters | 49.1B total · 3B active (MoE) Source: counted from official safetensors weights |
| Context length | — |
| Architecture | 27 layers (7 full-attention) · MLA+HYBRID · MoE |
| Released weights | BF16 · 98.3 GBdownload |
| Licence | MIT · Commercial OKPermissive licence (Apache-2.0 / MIT / CC-BY / OpenMDW): commercial use allowed. |
| Released | 2025-10-30 (Hugging Face repo created) |
02How much VRAM it needs (estimate)
Total = weights + 10% + 0.5GB overhead + KV cache for one request (FP16 KV). More concurrent users multiply the KV column.
| Precision | Weights | Total @ 8K | Total @ 32K | Total @ 128K | Smallest GPU | Mac |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| BF16 / FP16 (original) | 98.3 GB | 109 GB | 109 GB | 110 GB | H200 141GB | Mac 256GB |
| FP8 / INT8 / Q8_0 | 52.2 GB | 58.0 GB | 58.2 GB | 59.0 GB | H100 80GB | Mac 128GB |
| 4-bit (Q4_K_M / AWQ / GPTQ-Int4) | 29.8 GB | 33.3 GB | 33.5 GB | 34.3 GB | 2 × RTX 5090 (64GB) | Mac 64GB |
KV cache per request: 8K 0.1 GB · 32K 0.3 GB · 128K 1.1 GB
Bits per weight: BF16 16, FP8 8.5, 4-bit 4.85. “Fits” = total ≤ 90% of memory; Mac GPU can use ~2/3 of unified memory (≤36GB) or ~3/4 (larger). For MoE, all experts must be in memory, so size by total parameters. Method →
03How to run it
Only runtimes the publisher or the runtime’s official library names for this model.
- vLLM — mentioned in the official model card
- Transformers — mentioned in the official model card
04Official repositories & quantised builds
2 official repo(s) from moonshotai.
- Kimi-Linear-48B-A3B-Instruct Instruct
- Kimi-Linear-48B-A3B-Base Base
05Other Kimi models
All 14 →| Model | Params | 4-bit total | Released |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kimi-K3 | 2.8T / 104B | 1.87 TB | 2026-06-13 |
| Kimi-K2.7-Code | 1T / 32B | 668 GB | 2026-06-11 |
| Kimi-K2.6 | 1T / 32B | 668 GB | 2026-04-14 |
| Kimi-K2.5 | 1T / 32B | 668 GB | 2026-01-01 |
| Kimi-K2-Thinking | 1T / 32B | 668 GB | 2025-11-04 |
| Kimi-K2-Instruct-0905 | 1T / 32B | 668 GB | 2025-09-03 |
| Kimi-K2-Instruct | 1T / 32B | 668 GB | 2025-07-11 |
| Kimi-VL-A3B-Thinking-2506 | 16.4B / 3B | 11.7 GB | 2025-06-21 |
06Sources
Data checked 2025-12-16. Parameters, context and licence are copied from the official repository; memory figures are our estimates.