Moonlight-16B-A3B-Instruct The memory it needs, what you may do with it, and the hardware it suits.
Short answer. Moonlight-16B-A3B-Instruct needs about 11 GB of memory at 4-bit, 19 GB at 8-bit and 34 GB at full 16-bit precision, including runtime overhead and an 8,192-token KV cache. It has about 16 billion parameters and an 8,192-token context window. Licence in short: commercial use allowed. By memory alone, on ANVE’s launch configurations: ANVE One fits at BF16, ANVE Office fits at 8-bit, ANVE Office Pro (GPU) fits at 8-bit. These are estimates from its published size, not benchmarks.
01
What it is
Moonlight-16B-A3B-Instruct is a language model for chat, drafting and question answering, published by Moonshot AI on Hugging Face on 22 February 2025. It has about 16 billion parameters and a configured context window of 8,192 tokens. It is a mixture-of-experts model: 64 experts, 6 used for each token, so only about 3B parameters are active at a time.
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 33,800 downloads of it in the 30 days before we checked (7 Oct 2026), and 208 people have liked it there.
02
How much memory it needs
We size it the way you would size any model: the weights (parameters × bits ÷ 8), the KV cache for 8,192 tokens of context, and roughly 1.5 GB for the runtime itself. Real use varies with settings.
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)
32 GB
0.25 GB
34 GB
8-bit (Q8_0)
17 GB
0.25 GB
19 GB
4-bit (Q4_K)
9.0 GB
0.25 GB
11 GB
03
Architecture at a glance
Setting
Value in config.json
Architecture class
DeepseekV3ForCausalLM
Model type
deepseek_v3
Layers
27
Hidden size
2,048
Attention heads
16
Key-value heads
16
Head size
128
Vocabulary
163,840
Experts
64, 6 active per token
Configured context
8,192
Stored precision
bfloat16
04
Will it fit on ANVE?
These verdicts are arithmetic, not tests, against the specification at launch: ANVE One can give a model about three quarters of its 64 GB of unified memory, while ANVE Office and ANVE Office Pro hold it on a 24 GB graphics card and keep the rest of the stack in 64 GB or 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 BF16
ANVE Office
24 GB on the RTX PRO 4000 Blackwell SFF Edition
fits at 8-bit
ANVE Office Pro (GPU)
24 GB on the RTX PRO 4000 Blackwell
fits at 8-bit
05
What an office would use it for
This is the class ANVE runs by default (27B-class): strong enough for meeting minutes, summaries, drafting and question answering over an office’s own documents, and small enough for one box.
06
Variants with the same size
Moonlight-16B-A3B: a variant with the same size and memory needs (same parameter count, so the memory figures above apply).
07
Similar models to compare
DeepSeek-Coder-V2-Lite-Instruct (15.7B parameters, about 10 GB at 4-bit before context; custom licence: check before commercial use)
deepseek-moe-16b-chat (16.4B parameters, about 11 GB at 4-bit before context; custom licence: check before commercial use)
Qwen2.5-Coder-14B-Instruct (14.8B parameters, about 9.8 GB at 4-bit before context; commercial use allowed)
08
Questions people ask
How much memory does Moonlight-16B-A3B-Instruct need?
About 11 GB at 4-bit, 19 GB at 8-bit and 34 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 Moonlight-16B-A3B-Instruct run on a 24 GB graphics card?
Yes, at 8-bit by this estimate, with room left for context.
Is Moonlight-16B-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.
What is Moonlight-16B-A3B-Instruct’s context window?
Its configuration sets 8,192 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.
