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 Sealed
In our registry, Sealed means an artifact cleared the witness-cosign threshold and is anchored in the transparency log — the bar for a canonical, citable release. You don't have to take that on faith: open the live artifact page to see its current tier and provenance, or check any page at /verify.