Friday, 7 August 2026 | Updating Daily AI insight, written for builders

Qwen3 235B-A22B

Qwen3 235B-A22B — Especificaciones

DesarrolladorAlibaba
TipoLLM (MoE)
ModalidadTexto → Texto
Parámetros235 mil millones totales / 22 mil millones activos (MoE)
Ventana de contexto128 K
Salida máxima
LicenciaApache 2.0 (abierta)
Pesos abiertos
Lanzado2025
Precio de entrada0,45 $/millón
Precio de salida1,80 $/millón
Proveedores de APIAlibaba, OpenRouter

Ejecútelo localmente

VRAM (4 bits)~140 GB
GPU mínimaMulti-GPU o Mac con 192 GB

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What is Qwen3 235B-A22B?

Qwen3 235B-A22B is the open flagship of Alibaba’s Qwen3 family — a 235B mixture-of-experts
activating 22B parameters per token, released under Apache 2.0 with a 128K context. Pricing
is $0.45 in / $1.80 out per million tokens; self-hosting needs around 140 GB at 4-bit, which
means a multi-GPU setup or a 192 GB Mac.

The Mac line is not a curiosity. Apple’s unified memory architecture lets a single
workstation address far more model memory than any consumer GPU, so a 192 GB Mac Studio can
hold a 235B model that would otherwise require a multi-GPU server — at a fraction of the
power draw, noise and facilities cost. For a small team that needs frontier-adjacent open
weights on-premises, that is often the only realistic path, and Qwen3 235B-A22B is one of the
strongest models that fits it. Apache 2.0 licensing makes it cleaner to adopt than the Llama 4
models, which carry EU restrictions. The 128K context is narrower than the 1M offered by
newer flagships, which is the main trade-off to weigh.

Qwen3 235B-A22B pricing: API cost per 1M tokens

Entrada (por cada millón de tokens)$0.450
Salida (por cada millón de tokens)$1.80
Output/input ratio
Blended (4:1 in:out)$0.720 per 1M tokens

What Qwen3 235B-A22B costs per month

Real monthly spend at a 4:1 input-to-output mix — the ratio a typical chat or RAG workload actually produces.

Carga de trabajoTokens/mesCost / month
Proyecto secundario1 millón de tokens de entrada / 0,25 millones de tokens de salida$0.90
Pequeño equipo20 millones de tokens de entrada / 5 millones de tokens de salida$18
Producción200 millones de tokens de entrada / 50 millones de tokens de salida$180

Run your own numbers in the Calculadora de costos de API de IA.

Cheaper alternatives to Qwen3 235B-A22B

ModelosDólares por millón combinadosYou save
DeepSeek V4-Pro abierta$0.52228% cheaper
DeepSeek V4-Flash abierta$0.16877% cheaper
Llama 4 Maverick abierta$0.240un 67 % más barato

Self-host or pay the API?

Qwen3 235B-A22B is open-weight, so you can run it yourself. It needs ~140 GB of VRAM at 4-bit (Multi-GPU or Mac 192GB). Self-hosting only beats the API once your volume is high enough to keep that hardware busy — the calculadora de autohospedaje frente a API works out the break-even point for your token volume.

Preguntas frecuentes

How much does Qwen3 235B-A22B cost per 1M tokens?

Qwen3 235B-A22B costs $0.450 per 1M input tokens and $1.80 per 1M output tokens. At a typical 4:1 input-to-output mix that blends to about $0.720 per 1M tokens.

How much does Qwen3 235B-A22B cost per month?

A small-team workload of 20M input and 5M output tokens a month costs about $18 on Qwen3 235B-A22B. A side project (1M in / 0.25M out) costs roughly $0.90.

What is a cheaper alternative to Qwen3 235B-A22B?

DeepSeek V4-Pro is the strongest cheaper option in our database at $0.522 per 1M blended — about 28% less than Qwen3 235B-A22B. It is also open-weight, so self-hosting is an option.

Can I run Qwen3 235B-A22B locally?

Yes. Qwen3 235B-A22B is open-weight and needs about ~140 GB of VRAM at 4-bit quantisation (Multi-GPU or Mac 192GB).

Why does Qwen3 235B-A22B charge more for output than input?

Output tokens are generated one at a time and cannot be batched the way a prompt can, so they cost the provider more to serve. Qwen3 235B-A22B charges 4× more for output, which is why prompt-heavy workloads are far cheaper to run than generation-heavy ones.

Prices are the published list rates for the model's primary API and are reviewed as providers change them. Volume, batch and cached-input discounts are not included. Compare every model side by side in the Base de datos de modelos de IA o el Clasificación de modelos de lenguaje grande (LLM).

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