Kimi-Linear-48B-A3B-Instruct How much memory it needs, what its licence allows, and whether it fits an office box.
Short answer. Kimi-Linear-48B-A3B-Instruct needs about 29 GB of memory at 4-bit, 54 GB at 8-bit and 100 GB at full 16-bit precision, including runtime overhead and an 8,192-token KV cache. It has about 49.1 billion parameters. 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
Kimi-Linear-48B-A3B-Instruct is a language model for chat, drafting and question answering, published by Moonshot AI on Hugging Face on 30 October 2025. It has about 49.1 billion parameters. It is a mixture-of-experts model with about 3B parameters active per token.
Its card lists the licence as MIT. In short, the licence allows commercial use, modification and redistribution as long as the copyright notice is kept.
Hugging Face counted about 220,953 downloads of it in the 30 days before we checked (7 Oct 2026), and 608 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 0.03 MB of KV cache at 16-bit, so 32,768 tokens would add about 1.0 GB. This model uses multi-head latent attention, which stores a compressed cache.
Precision
Weights
KV cache (8,192 tokens)
Total, estimated
BF16 (full precision)
98 GB
0.25 GB
100 GB
8-bit (Q8_0)
52 GB
0.25 GB
54 GB
4-bit (Q4_K)
28 GB
0.25 GB
29 GB
03
Architecture at a glance
Setting
Value in config.json
Architecture class
KimiLinearForCausalLM
Model type
kimi_linear
Layers
27
Hidden size
2,304
Attention heads
32
Key-value heads
32
Head size
72
Vocabulary
163,840
Experts
256
Stored precision
bfloat16
04
Will it fit on ANVE?
Arithmetic against the launch specification, not a test: about three quarters of ANVE One’s 64 GB of unified memory for the model (as AMD’s Variable Graphics Memory allows), and the 24 GB on the graphics card in ANVE Office and ANVE Office Pro, which keep the rest of the stack in 64 GB and 128 GB of system memory. 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
Similar models to compare
Llama-3_3-Nemotron-Super-49B-v1_5 (49.9B parameters, about 30 GB at 4-bit before context; custom licence: check before commercial use)
Phi-3.5-MoE-instruct (41.9B parameters, about 25 GB at 4-bit before context; commercial use allowed)
Seed-OSS-36B-Instruct (36.2B parameters, about 22 GB at 4-bit before context; commercial use allowed)
07
Questions people ask
How much memory does Kimi-Linear-48B-A3B-Instruct need?
About 29 GB at 4-bit, 54 GB at 8-bit and 100 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 Kimi-Linear-48B-A3B-Instruct run on a 24 GB graphics card?
Not entirely: even at 4-bit it needs about 29 GB, so part of it would sit in system memory, which is much slower.
Is Kimi-Linear-48B-A3B-Instruct free for commercial use?
Its card lists MIT, which allows commercial use, modification and redistribution as long as the copyright notice is kept. Read the licence itself before relying on this summary; it is not legal advice.
08
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.
