Qwen3 Coder 480B A35B Instruct

Qwen3 Coder 480B A35B Instruct is a code-focused member of Alibaba's Qwen3 model family. As its name indicates, it is a mixture-of-experts (MoE) design with roughly 480 billion total parameters and about 35 billion active per token, and it is an instruct-tuned variant rather than a base checkpoint. Within the Qwen3 lineup, the Coder branch is the specialization aimed at programming work, while general Qwen3 Instruct and reasoning variants cover broader chat and analysis tasks. The MoE architecture is the defining technical characteristic here: only a fraction of the total parameter count is activated for any given token, which is what allows a model of this scale to be served at inference costs closer to a much smaller dense model. It is exposed as a chat-completions style model by the providers that host it, and is typically used for code writing, refactoring, debugging, and multi-step agentic coding loops where the model calls tools, reads files, and iterates. We do not track a confirmed context window, modality list, or tool-calling spec for this entry in our database — check the serving provider's documentation for the exact context length and feature support they expose, since these can differ between hosts of the same weights. In practice, this model is generally evaluated against other large code-specialized models and against general-purpose chat models used for programming. Its appeal is the combination of a code-tuned instruct model with MoE efficiency, and the fact that Qwen models are served by multiple independent inference providers, which gives buyers a choice of endpoints rather than a single vendor. Latency and throughput vary meaningfully between those hosts, so benchmark numbers from one provider should not be assumed to hold for another.