LLM Reference

Qwen3-30B-A3B

Released
2025-04-28
Last refreshed
2026-06-15
Status
Researched 25d ago
Open sourceCommercial use: permittedRAGLong contextClassificationJSON / Tool use

Qwen3-30B-A3B is worth evaluating for rag, long context, and classification when its provider route and context window match the workload.

Use it for

  • Teams evaluating rag, long context, and classification
  • Workloads that can use a 128k context window
  • Buyers comparing 4 tracked provider routes

Do not use it for

  • Vision or document-understanding workloads
Specifications
Family
Qwen3
Released
2025-04-28
Context
128k
Parameters
30B
Architecture
Mixture of Experts
Specialization
general
Openness
Open source
License
Apache 2.0OSI-approvedCommercial use: permitted
Training
Pretrained
Created by

AI research institute of Alibaba Group.

Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China
Founded 2017
Website
Pricing
Output / 1M
$0.280
Input / 1M
$0.080

Cheapest of 6 routes · OpenRouter

About

Alibaba's Qwen3-30B with 3B active parameters via mixture-of-experts architecture. Delivers strong performance with efficient inference on Cloudflare Workers AI platform.

Qwen3-30B-A3B is Alibaba's Qwen3 generation mixture-of-experts model, released April 28, 2025 under the Apache 2.0 license. The model has 30.5 billion total parameters with approximately 3.3 billion active parameters per token, organized across 48 transformer layers with 128 experts and 8 experts activated per token using grouped-query attention. The native context window is 32,768 tokens, extendable to 131,072 tokens using YaRN position scaling. The model was trained on 36 trillion tokens—double the dataset of Qwen2.5—and supports 119 languages and dialects.

A key feature distinguishing Qwen3 from prior Qwen generations is a hybrid thinking/non-thinking mode: the model can switch between extended chain-of-thought reasoning (thinking mode, for mathematics, coding, and logic) and fast direct response (non-thinking mode, for general tasks) within a single deployment, controlled by an inference-time parameter. This dual-mode capability allows operators to tune the cost-quality trade-off without deploying separate models. The 30B-A3B MoE configuration competes with dense 70B-scale models due to expert routing efficiency while incurring approximately 3.3B-equivalent compute cost per token.

Qwen3-30B-A3B is available via Cloudflare Workers AI, AWS Bedrock, Fireworks AI, OpenRouter, Novita AI, and the Vercel AI Gateway. It is the smaller of the two Qwen3 MoE variants (alongside Qwen3-235B-A22B) and is appropriate for organizations needing strong reasoning and coding performance at lower per-token compute cost than the Qwen3-32B dense model.

Qwen3-30B-A3B has a 128k-token context window.

Qwen3-30B-A3B input tokens at $0.051/1M, output at $0.335/1M.

Top use-case fit

RAG

Included by capability and metadata signals in the decision map.

Long context

Included by capability and metadata signals in the decision map.

Classification

Included by capability and metadata signals in the decision map.

Capabilities

Structured Outputs

Benchmark peer barsfor RAG

No task-mapped benchmark peers are available for this model yet.

Benchmark scores(1)

Scores are benchmark-specific and are direction-aware: the same numeric gap can mean very different outcomes across suites. Use the leaderboard context and this model's provider route to decide whether the winning margin is meaningful for your workload.
BenchmarkScoreVersionSource
Google-Proof Q&A61.6diamondhttps://pricepertoken.com/leaderboards/benchmark/gpqa

Migration checks

No linked migration route is available for this model yet.