Skip to main content
Watch: I Built an AI App Without Leaving Databricks

Alibaba Cloud (Qwen) - Mixture of experts - verified

Run Qwen3.6-35B-A3B locally

Qwen3.6-35B-A3B is a 36B mixture-of-experts (3B active) model from Alibaba Cloud (Qwen) with a 262K-token context window, released under Apache License 2.0 (commercial use is allowed); the smallest listed download is 20.4 GB, the 4bit MLX build from mlx-community/Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-4bit.

Official weights: Qwen/Qwen3.6-35B-A3B - modalities: text, image, video

Total params
36B
Active params
3B
Context
262K
Smallest download
20.4 GB

Fits in

Smallest download at most 85% of memory

Downloads

The official weights and every quantization listed for this model, with file sizes from Hugging Face.

Qwen3.6-35B-A3B downloads and file sizes
DownloadFormatSizeRepo
Official weightsBF1671.9 GBQwen/Qwen3.6-35B-A3B
UD-Q4_K_MGGUF22.1 GBunsloth/Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-GGUF
Q8_0GGUF36.9 GBunsloth/Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-GGUF
4bitSmallest listedMLX20.4 GBmlx-community/Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-4bit

GB is decimal: 1 GB = 10^9 bytes. Add memory for the context and the operating system on top of the file size.

Run it

Copied verbatim from the page linked under each command. Server commands from model cards often assume a multi-GPU node; check the flags before you run them.

Ollama

Terminal
ollama run qwen3.6

Source: ollama.com/library/qwen3.6

vLLM

Terminal
vllm serve Qwen/Qwen3.6-35B-A3B --port 8000 --tensor-parallel-size 8 --max-model-len 262144 --reasoning-parser qwen3

Source: huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3.6-35B-A3B

SGLang

Terminal
python -m sglang.launch_server --model-path Qwen/Qwen3.6-35B-A3B --port 8000 --tp-size 8 --mem-fraction-static 0.8 --context-length 262144 --reasoning-parser qwen3

Source: huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3.6-35B-A3B

Transformers

Terminal
transformers serve Qwen/Qwen3.6-35B-A3B --port 8000 --continuous-batching

Source: huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3.6-35B-A3B

Not sure which runtime to use? Compare local LLM runtimes by platform, API and features.

License

License
Apache License 2.0apache-2.0
Commercial use
Commercial use: YesCommercial use is allowed.
Gated download
No. The files download directly.

Worth knowing

Thinking mode is on by default, and the card advises keeping a context length of at least 128K tokens to preserve thinking capabilities.

Released (Hugging Face repo creation date).

API pricing and specsHosted prices per 1M tokens for Qwen3.6-35B-A3B, if you would rather not run it yourself.

FAQ

How big is the Qwen3.6-35B-A3B download?

The official BF16 weights in Qwen/Qwen3.6-35B-A3B are 71.9 GB. The smallest listed download is 20.4 GB, the 4bit MLX build from mlx-community/Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-4bit. Plan for more memory than the file size: the context (KV cache) and the operating system need room too.

Can I use Qwen3.6-35B-A3B commercially?

Qwen3.6-35B-A3B is released under Apache License 2.0, and commercial use is allowed. The license text is at https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3.6-35B-A3B/blob/main/LICENSE.

How much memory do I need for Qwen3.6-35B-A3B?

By this directory's rule of thumb it fits in 32 GB and up: the smallest listed download, 20.4 GB, is at most 85% of 32 GB, which leaves room for the context and the operating system.

How do I run Qwen3.6-35B-A3B with Ollama?

Run "ollama run qwen3.6", as shown at https://ollama.com/library/qwen3.6. The Ollama library lists the qwen3.6:35b tag at 23GB - 24GB.

What is the context length of Qwen3.6-35B-A3B?

262,144 tokens. A longer context needs more memory for the KV cache, so you can run with a shorter one when memory is tight.

Sources

Last verified from the pages below.

Newsletter

New open weights, every week

One email per week. New model releases, open-weight drops and what they mean for what you build.