What it is
Qwen3-235B-A22B is a sparse mixture-of-experts model: of its 235B total parameters, a router activates 8 of 128 experts per token, so roughly 22B parameters do the work on any given forward pass. That's the MoE trade — frontier-scale capacity at a fraction of the per-token compute of an equivalently-capable dense model. The original April 2025 release shipped with Qwen3's defining feature: a single checkpoint that can run in a deliberate "thinking" mode or a faster "non-thinking" mode, switched by a prompt directive rather than by loading a separate model.
It is licensed Apache 2.0 — one of the genuinely permissive open-weight licenses, with no acceptable-use rider or scale gate. For capability and benchmark figures, see Qwen's own write-up and model card rather than numbers retyped here:
- Qwen3 release blog — qwenlm.github.io/blog/qwen3
- Model card — huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3-235B-A22B
Sizing it honestly
This is a datacenter model, not an edge one. The native FP8 weights are roughly 220 GB on disk; BF16 is roughly 438 GB. Even at FP8 you need multiple high-memory accelerators (e.g. several H100/H200-class GPUs) to hold the weights plus KV cache. Anyone promising a 235B MoE on a single edge device is selling something — the arithmetic doesn't allow it.
Why it's Quarantine
In our registry, Quarantine means we hold the publisher's own hash for these weights, logged and signed — but we have not yet downloaded the 220 GB ourselves and checked that hash against what actually arrives. That last step is what promotes an artifact to Hardened, and it is the only tier where the number you read is one we produced. You don't have to take any of this on faith: open the live artifact page to see its current tier and provenance, or check any page at /verify.