// Kimi · Vision-language
Kimi-VL-A3B-Instruct: VRAM & local deployment
16.4B total · 3B active (MoE) parameters. About 11.7 GB at 4-bit and 36.8 GB at BF16 with one 8K-token request.
released 2025-04-09licence: Commercial OKmemory figures are estimates
01Specs
| Publisher | Moonshot AI · moonshotai |
|---|---|
| Family / series | Kimi · Kimi-VL |
| Type | Vision-language (image-text-to-text) |
| Parameters | 16.4B total · 3B active (MoE) Source: counted from official safetensors weights |
| Context length | 128K tokens (131,072)max_position_embeddings in config.json |
| Architecture | 27 layers · MLA · MoE |
| Released weights | BF16 · 32.8 GBdownload |
| Licence | MIT · Commercial OKPermissive licence (Apache-2.0 / MIT / CC-BY / OpenMDW): commercial use allowed. |
| Released | 2025-04-09 (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) | 32.8 GB | 36.9 GB | 37.6 GB | 40.7 GB | 2 × RTX 5090 (64GB) | Mac 64GB |
| FP8 / INT8 / Q8_0 | 17.4 GB | 19.9 GB | 20.7 GB | 23.8 GB | RTX 4090 24GB | Mac 36GB |
| 4-bit (Q4_K_M / AWQ / GPTQ-Int4) | 9.9 GB | 11.7 GB | 12.5 GB | 15.5 GB | 16GB GPU | Mac 24GB |
KV cache per request: 8K 0.3 GB · 32K 1.0 GB · 128K 4.1 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
1 official repo(s) from moonshotai.
- Kimi-VL-A3B-Instruct Instruct
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-Linear-48B-A3B-Instruct | 49.1B / 3B | 33.3 GB | 2025-10-30 |
| Kimi-K2-Instruct-0905 | 1T / 32B | 668 GB | 2025-09-03 |
| Kimi-K2-Instruct | 1T / 32B | 668 GB | 2025-07-11 |
06Sources
Data checked 2026-01-30. Parameters, context and licence are copied from the official repository; memory figures are our estimates.