No — not on this device

Kimi K3 2.8T-A104B at Q4_K_M needs 1564.0 GB against 204.8 GB usable, and the shortfall of 1359.2 GB is more than 32 GB of system RAM can cover at a tolerable speed. A smaller sibling or a lower quantisation is the honest answer here.

Does not fit 8K context Q4_K_M · 1563.2 GB Modified MIT Released 27 Jul 2026 New this month Vision Not in the Ollama library

The largest open-weight model ever published. 69 of 93 blocks are linear attention, so its cache is tiny; its 2.8T weights are the problem.

What hardware do I need for Kimi K3 2.8T-A104B? →

The VRAM budget

weights 1563.2 GB
Weights 1563.2 GB KV cache @ 8K 0.21 GB Runtime overhead 0.6 GB Over budget 1359.2 GB past 204.8 GB

Quantisation ladder

QuantWeightsTotal @ 8KMax contextTok/sQualityFit
Q8_0 2750.9 GB 2751.7 GB ~0.6 −0.1% ppl 2546.9 GB over
Q6_K 2123.0 GB 2123.9 GB ~0.7 −0.4% ppl 1919.1 GB over
Q5_K_M 1835.0 GB 1835.8 GB ~0.8 −0.8% ppl 1631.0 GB over
Q4_K_M 1563.2 GB 1564.0 GB ~1.0 −1.9% ppl 1359.2 GB over
Q3_K_M 1265.4 GB 1266.2 GB ~1.2 −5.4% ppl 1061.4 GB over
Q2_K 1084.2 GB 1085.0 GB ~1.4 −15% ppl 880.2 GB over

Quality is the published perplexity delta against f16 weights. Max context assumes an f16 KV cache; q8_0 roughly doubles it. Only 24 of its 93 blocks keep a per-token KV cache; the rest are linear-attention, Mamba or convolution blocks with a fixed-size state. This model uses multi-head latent attention, so its cache is a compressed latent rather than full K and V.

How to run it

terminal
$ llama-server \
    -hf moonshotai/Kimi-K3:Q4_K_M \
    -c 8192 -ngl 12

The engine underneath most of the others. Every knob is exposed. More on llama.cpp.

01Download is 1563.2 GB. Keep it on an SSD — a first load off a spinning disk takes minutes.
02With no GPU, thread count matters more than clock. Start at one thread per physical core.
03If it falls back to CPU silently, drop the context first, then step down a quantisation.
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