Arctic
Arctic is a legacy integration reference; keep it only while you identify a current replacement.
Use it for
- Teams maintaining an existing integration
- Workloads that can use a 4k context window
- Buyers comparing 3 tracked provider routes
Do not use it for
- New production launches
- Vision or document-understanding workloads
- Family
- Arctic
- Released
- 2024-04-24
- Context
- 4k
- Parameters
- 480B
- Architecture
- Mixture of Experts
- Specialization
- general
- Openness
- Open source
- License
- Apache 2.0(OSI)Commercial use allowed
- Training
- finetuned
Cheapest of 4 routes · Microsoft Foundry
About
Snowflake Arctic is an advanced large language model tailored for enterprise applications by Snowflake AI Research. It features an innovative Dense-MoE Hybrid transformer architecture, combining a 10 billion parameter dense transformer with a 128 x 3.66 billion parameter MoE MLP, totaling 480 billion parameters but utilizing only 17 billion actively. This structure optimizes efficiency, particularly for tasks like SQL generation, coding, and instruction following. The model's training spanned a diverse dataset of 3.5 trillion tokens, focusing on enterprise needs. Despite its capabilities, Arctic's deployment presents challenges due to its size, and it remains vulnerable to inaccuracies with unclear inputs. Open-sourced under the Apache 2.0 license, it provides comprehensive access to its weights, code, and research findings 1 2 4 5.
Arctic is an open-source model. The structured metadata tracks a 4k-token context window and structured outputs. This page tracks provider routes through NVIDIA NIM, Microsoft Foundry, Together AI, and 1 more, with the cheapest tracked route listed at $0.65 input and $2.75 output per 1M tokens. No headline benchmark score is tracked for Arctic yet.
Top use-case fit
Classification
Included by capability and metadata signals in the decision map.
JSON / Tool use
Included by capability and metadata signals in the decision map.
Provider price ladder
Compare all 4Compare API pricing across 3 providers for input and output tokens, batch, and cached reads when available.
| Provider | Input / 1M | Output / 1M | Route |
|---|---|---|---|
| Microsoft Foundry | $2.00 | $2.00 | Provisioned |
| Replicate API | $0.650 | $2.75 | Serverless |
| NVIDIA NIM | - | - | ProvisionedPartial |
Available via routers & gateways(7)
Azure AI Foundry Model Router
RouterMicrosoft Azure AI Foundry's native model router that uses a trained ML model to route each prompt in real time to the optimal Azure-hosted model, with Balanced/Cost/Quality mode selection and automatic failover.
Helicone
GatewayObservability-first AI gateway with routing, caching, rate limiting, and request tracing; Apache 2.0 open-source core with a managed hosted tier for logging and analytics.
Kong AI Gateway
GatewayMulti-LLM AI gateway built on Kong Gateway 3.x, adding semantic routing, load balancing, guardrails, and MCP traffic analytics as plugins over Kong's existing API management platform.
LiteLLM
GatewayOpen-source Python SDK and proxy server that unifies 100+ LLM APIs behind a single OpenAI-compatible interface, with load balancing, cost tracking, and configurable failover.
NVIDIA LLM Router Blueprint
RouterNVIDIA's open-source AI blueprint for LLM routing that selects the optimal model per prompt via intent classification or neural auto-routing; being deprecated 2026-06-20.
OpenRouter
HybridUnified hybrid gateway to 400+ models from 60+ providers via a single OpenAI-compatible API, with optional auto-routing that selects the best model per prompt.
Capabilities
Benchmark peer barsfor Classification
No task-mapped benchmark peers are available for this model yet.
Migration checks
No linked migration route is available for this model yet.
Cheapest of 4 routes · Microsoft Foundry