Kimi K3 (2.8T — What It Takes)
What Kimi K3 is, what it actually takes to self-host 2.8 trillion parameters, and what to run on Clore.ai instead
Straight answer first: Kimi K3 does not fit on any server listed on the Clore.ai marketplace, at any quantization. The smallest community build is a 1-bit GGUF at 466GB; the largest rig on the marketplace is 380GB. This page explains what K3 is, what hosting it really requires, and which models give you most of the capability on hardware you can rent today.
Moonshot AI published Kimi K3 weights on 27 July 2026 — the first open model in the 3-trillion-parameter class. It is a genuine milestone, and it is also a useful calibration point for how far "open weights" and "self-hostable" have drifted apart.
Key Specs
Parameters
2.8T total, 16 of 896 experts active per token
Architecture
Kimi Delta Attention (KDA) + Attention Residuals, Stable LatentMoE, 69 KDA + 24 Gated MLA layers
Modality
Text, image, video in → text out
Context
1,000,000 tokens
License
Kimi K3 licence (custom — commercial inference above roughly $20M annual revenue requires separate terms)
Release
Hosted 16 July 2026, weights 27 July 2026
Weights
Q8 1,561GB · Q4_K_XL 1,509GB · Q2_K_XL 861GB · IQ1_S 594GB · Q1_0 466GB
Moonshot claims roughly 2.5× better scaling efficiency than Kimi K2 from the sparser MoE and the KDA attention stack, with native multimodal training rather than a bolted-on vision tower.
What hosting it actually takes
UD-Q8_K_XL
1,561GB
~20× H100 80GB
UD-Q4_K_XL
1,509GB
~20× H100 80GB
UD-Q2_K_XL
861GB
~11× H100 80GB, or 8× H200
UD-IQ1_S
594GB
~8× H100 80GB
UD-Q1_0
466GB
~6× H100 80GB
mgoin/Kimi-K3-pruned75
475GB
~6× H100 80GB
For reference, the largest Clore.ai marketplace rigs are 4× RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell (380GB) and 11× RTX 5090 (341GB). Even the 1-bit build overshoots them, and a 1-bit quantization of a frontier model is not a serious production target anyway.
What to run on Clore.ai instead
The honest summary: since June 2026 the open frontier has split. Models like GLM-5.2 and Nemotron 3 Ultra sit at the edge of what a big consumer rig can hold; K3 sits past it. Most of the practical gap between them closes with a good harness and a long context, both of which the models above give you.
Using K3 without hosting it
Moonshot serves K3 through the Kimi app, Kimi Code and its API. If you are building on Clore.ai, a common pattern is to keep the expensive frontier calls on an API and run the high-volume path locally on a rented GPU — see the cost comparison in Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite, which walks through when self-hosting actually wins.
Next Steps
GLM-5.2 — the largest model you can realistically rent here
GPU Pricing & Availability — what the ceiling is right now
Qwen3.8-27B — the single-card workhorse
Kimi K2.5 — the previous generation, far more tractable
Links
Rent a GPU: Marketplace · Bare metal
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