Apertus-70B-2509 The memory it needs, what you may do with it, and the hardware it suits.
Short answer. Apertus-70B-2509 needs about 44 GB of memory at 4-bit, 79 GB at 8-bit and 145 GB at full 16-bit precision, including runtime overhead and an 8,192-token KV cache. It has about 70.6 billion parameters and a 65,536-token context window. Licence in short: commercial use allowed. By memory alone, on ANVE’s launch configurations: ANVE One fits at 4-bit, ANVE Office only with partial offload to system memory, which is much slower, ANVE Office Pro (GPU) only with partial offload to system memory, which is much slower. These are estimates from its published size, not benchmarks.
01
What it is
Apertus-70B-2509 is a language model for chat, drafting and question answering, published by the Swiss AI Initiative (EPFL and ETH Zurich) on Hugging Face on 2 September 2025. It has about 70.6 billion parameters and a configured context window of 65,536 tokens.
Its card lists the licence as Apache 2.0. In short, the licence allows commercial use, modification and redistribution, with attribution and a copy of the licence, and includes a patent grant.
Hugging Face counted about 23,637 downloads of it in the 30 days before we checked (7 Oct 2026), and 160 people have liked it there.
02
How much memory it needs
How these figures are worked out: weights = parameters × bits per weight ÷ 8. The KV cache is added for 8,192 tokens of context, plus about 1.5 GB of runtime overhead. Treat the totals as planning estimates.
Each token of context adds about 0.33 MB of KV cache at 16-bit, so 32,768 tokens would add about 11 GB.
Precision
Weights
KV cache (8,192 tokens)
Total, estimated
BF16 (full precision)
141 GB
2.7 GB
145 GB
8-bit (Q8_0)
75 GB
2.7 GB
79 GB
4-bit (Q4_K)
40 GB
2.7 GB
44 GB
03
Architecture at a glance
Setting
Value in config.json
Architecture class
ApertusForCausalLM
Model type
apertus
Layers
80
Hidden size
8,192
Attention heads
64
Key-value heads
8 (grouped-query attention)
Head size
128
Vocabulary
131,072
Configured context
65,536
Stored precision
bfloat16
04
Will it fit on ANVE?
How the verdicts are worked out: on ANVE One, about three quarters of 64 GB of unified memory is available to the model; on ANVE Office and ANVE Office Pro, the model has to fit in the 24 GB on the graphics card, with 64 GB or 128 GB of system memory for everything else. This is arithmetic against the launch specification, not a test. ANVE’s tested default is Qwen 3.8 27B; this model is not yet validated on ANVE.
Configuration (at launch)
Memory for the model
Verdict
ANVE One
about 48 GB of 64 GB unified memory
fits at 4-bit
ANVE Office
24 GB on the RTX PRO 4000 Blackwell SFF Edition
only with partial offload to system memory, which is much slower
ANVE Office Pro (GPU)
24 GB on the RTX PRO 4000 Blackwell
only with partial offload to system memory, which is much slower
05
What an office would use it for
Models this large are stronger on long, hard drafting and reasoning, but need most of a 64 to 128 GB machine even at 4-bit, which leaves less room for long documents and several users.
06
Variants with the same size
Apertus-70B-Instruct-2509: a later dated release of the same model (same parameter count, so the memory figures above apply).
07
Similar models to compare
DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-70B (70.6B parameters, about 41 GB at 4-bit before context; commercial use allowed)
Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct (70.6B parameters, about 41 GB at 4-bit before context; commercial use allowed, with conditions)
Meta-Llama-3-70B-Instruct (70.6B parameters, about 41 GB at 4-bit before context; commercial use allowed, with conditions)
08
Questions people ask
How much memory does Apertus-70B-2509 need?
About 44 GB at 4-bit, 79 GB at 8-bit and 145 GB at full 16-bit precision, including an 8,192-token KV cache and about 1.5 GB of runtime overhead. These are estimates from its parameter count.
Can Apertus-70B-2509 run on a 24 GB graphics card?
Not entirely: even at 4-bit it needs about 44 GB, so part of it would sit in system memory, which is much slower.
Is Apertus-70B-2509 free for commercial use?
Its card lists Apache 2.0, which allows commercial use, modification and redistribution, with attribution and a copy of the licence, and includes a patent grant. Read the licence itself before relying on this summary; it is not legal advice.
What is Apertus-70B-2509’s context window?
Its configuration sets 65,536 tokens. Longer contexts need more memory for the KV cache, so the practical limit on a given machine can be lower.
09
What is not real yet
No sealed ANVE unit exists; every image of the appliance on this site is a labelled render. The software runs today on a development machine. No customers yet, no certifications, no delivery date, and the final price is not announced.
Reservations are ₹999 in India or US$12 elsewhere, refundable in full until you confirm an order in writing (terms). Offices that cannot use cloud AI can apply to be one of ten design partners.
