// Qwen · Embedding
Qwen3-Embedding-4B: VRAM & local deployment
4.02B parameters. About 3.2 GB at 4-bit and 9.3 GB at BF16.
released 2025-06-03licence: Commercial OKmemory figures are estimates
01Specs
| Publisher | Alibaba Qwen · Qwen |
|---|---|
| Family / series | Qwen · Qwen3-Embedding |
| Type | Embedding (feature-extraction) |
| Parameters | 4.02B Source: counted from official safetensors weights |
| Released weights | BF16 · 8.0 GBdownload |
| Licence | Apache-2.0 · Commercial OKPermissive licence (Apache-2.0 / MIT / CC-BY / OpenMDW): commercial use allowed. |
| Released | 2025-06-03 (Hugging Face repo created) |
02How much VRAM it needs (estimate)
Embedding models are small; memory grows with batch size and sequence length.
| Precision | Weights | Weights + overhead | Smallest GPU | Mac |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| BF16 / FP16 (original) | 8.0 GB | 9.3 GB | 12GB GPU | Mac 16GB |
| FP8 / INT8 / Q8_0 | 4.3 GB | 5.2 GB | 8GB GPU | Mac 16GB |
| 4-bit (Q4_K_M / AWQ / GPTQ-Int4) | 2.4 GB | 3.2 GB | 8GB GPU | Mac 16GB |
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
- Sentence Transformers — mentioned in the official model card
- Ollama — in the official Ollama library · qwen3-embedding:4b
ollama run qwen3-embedding:4b04Official repositories & quantised builds
1 official repo(s) from Qwen.
- Qwen3-Embedding-4B main
05Other Qwen models
All 112 →| Model | Params | 4-bit total | Released |
|---|---|---|---|
| Qwen3-Embedding-0.6B · same series | 596M | 0.9 GB | 2025-06-03 |
| Qwen3-Embedding-8B · same series | 7.57B | 5.5 GB | 2025-06-03 |
| Qwen-Image-2.1-Turbo | 7.12B | 5.2 GB | 2026-10-09 |
| Qwen-Image-2.1 | 7.12B | 5.2 GB | 2026-09-14 |
| Qwen3.8-Flash-Next | 180B / 6B | 121 GB | 2026-08-24 |
| Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B | 2.4T / 95B | 1.60 TB | 2026-08-08 |
| Qwen3.8-27B | 27.8B | 19.6 GB | 2026-08-05 |
| Qwen3.6-27B | 27.8B | 19.6 GB | 2026-04-21 |
| Qwen3.6-35B-A3B | 36B / 3B | 24.6 GB | 2026-04-15 |
| Qwen3.5-0.8B | 873M | 1.2 GB | 2026-02-28 |
06Sources
Data checked 2025-06-20. Parameters, context and licence are copied from the official repository; memory figures are our estimates.