Alibaba Qwen3-Coder 30B-A3B (MoE) VRAM Requirements Guide
Ultra-fast agentic coding Mixture-of-Experts model. Holds 30.5B total weights inside a single 24GB GPU while activating just 3.3B parameters per token for 100+ tok/s IDE autocomplete.
>98% perplexity retention. Standard Ollama/llama.cpp quantization.
Virtually identical to FP16 (~99.9% fidelity). Demands high-capacity VRAM.
Uncompressed weights. Requires multi-GPU clusters or datacenter cards.
Architectural Memory Breakdown & KV-Cache Scaling
Agentic coding tools (Claude Code, Cline, Roo Code, Aider) issue dozens of sequential multi-thousand-token tool calls per task, making dense 32B generation speeds (~35 tok/s) feel sluggish during full-file rewrites. Alibaba's `Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B` solves this with fine-grained MoE routing across 48 layers and ultra-lean 4-KV-head GQA (`headDim = 128`). Its 8k FP16 KV-cache takes only `0.75 GiB` (`12.0 GiB` at full 128k, or `6.0 GiB` in FP8!), bringing total `Q4_K_M` VRAM to `20.66 GB`—fitting cleanly inside any 24GB GPU while streaming patches at 95–155 tok/s.
On a 24GB RTX 3090 or 4090, enable `-fa on -ctk q8_0 -ctv q8_0` (`--kv-cache-dtype fp8` in vLLM) to unlock a massive 48k–64k repository context window alongside `Q4_K_M` weights (`~23.1 GB` total) with zero CPU offload.
Provides sufficient headroom for weights, 8k+ context KV-cache, and CUDA runtime buffers without Out-Of-Memory (OOM) crashes.
Run Alibaba Qwen3-Coder 30B-A3B (MoE) Locally
ollama run qwen3-coder:30b-a3b-q4_K_Mvllm serve Qwen/Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct --max-model-len 32768 --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder --gpu-memory-utilization 0.95Frequently Asked Questions
Can a 16GB GPU (RTX 5060 Ti 16GB / 4070 Ti Super) run Qwen3-Coder 30B-A3B?
Because only 3.3B parameters are active per token, offloading ~6 GB of cold expert weights to dual-channel DDR5-6000 RAM via `llama-server --n-cpu-moe 12` still sustains 25–40 tok/s—far more usable than offloading a dense 32B model!
How fast does Qwen3-Coder 30B-A3B run on Apple Silicon Macs?
A 36GB M3/M4 Max MacBook Pro holds all 20.66 GB in unified Metal RAM and generates 65–85 tok/s silently on battery power.
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