Model reference · open weights

Kimi-K2-Thinking

LLMs moonshotai Text gen 2 builds Its own licence terms 43k dl/mo

Kimi-K2-Thinking is an open-weight language model from moonshotai. Kimi-K2-Thinking-NVFP4 (NVFP4) weighs 594 GB; the smallest configuration that runs it is 8× A100 80 GB.

  • Kimi-K2-Thinking is a 1026.4B parameter Mixture-of-Experts model developed by moonshotai for text generation and agentic reasoning.
  • It features a 262144 token context window and utilizes native INT4 quantization to reduce inference latency and memory usage.
  • The model is designed to perform multi-step reasoning and tool orchestration, with weights released under an other license.

Summary of the moonshotai/Kimi-K2-Thinking model card, 2026-10-01. The estimate below is for another build of the family.

What it is

Released bymoonshotai
Released2025-11-04
Parameters1026.4B
VRAM594 GB for the weights

What it runs on

Memory and cards for Kimi-K2-Thinking-NVFP4 (NVFP4)

594 GBweights, file size
40 MBcache per 1K tokens (8-bit)
2.4 GBruntime overhead, at least
262,144 tokenscontext max
CardRequests at onceContext maxMemory
8K each32K each
RTX 3060 12 GB … 8× H100 80 GB
13 smaller cards
———
8× A100 80 GB
tensor parallel · FP4 without its speed-up here
4136K78.2 GB a card
4× B200 180 GB
tensor parallel
266209K176 GB a card
8× H200 141 GB
tensor parallel · FP4 without its speed-up here
15839all 256K138 GB a card
Memory needed at each load
Requests at once8K tokens each32K tokens each
1597 GB598 GB
5598 GB603 GB
8599 GB607 GB
16602 GB618 GB
32607 GB639 GB
64618 GB681 GB

One card, with vLLM's small-card settings.

Builds

Sizes, precisions & builds

BuildParamsPrecisionWeightsSmallest setup
Kimi-K2-Thinking ↗ 1026.4BINT4 594 GB8× A100 80 GB
Kimi-K2-Thinking-NVFP4 (above) ↗
packaged by nvidia
519.1BNVFP4 594 GB8× A100 80 GB

From the model card

What moonshotai says about Kimi-K2-Thinking

Read the model card

1. Model Introduction

Kimi K2 Thinking is the latest, most capable version of open-source thinking model. Starting with Kimi K2, we built it as a thinking agent that reasons step-by-step while dynamically invoking tools. It sets a new state-of-the-art on Humanity's Last Exam (HLE), BrowseComp, and other benchmarks by dramatically scaling multi-step reasoning depth and maintaining stable tool-use across 200–300 sequential calls. At the same time, K2 Thinking is a native INT4 quantization model with 256k context window, achieving lossless reductions in inference latency and GPU memory usage.

Key Features

  • Deep Thinking & Tool Orchestration: End-to-end trained to interleave chain-of-thought reasoning with function calls, enabling autonomous research, coding, and writing workflows that last hundreds of steps without drift.
  • Native INT4 Quantization: Quantization-Aware Training (QAT) is employed in post-training stage to achieve lossless 2x speed-up in low-latency mode.
  • Stable Long-Horizon Agency: Maintains coherent goal-directed behavior across up to 200–300 consecutive tool invocations, surpassing prior models that degrade after 30–50 steps.

2. Model Summary

ArchitectureMixture-of-Experts (MoE)
Total Parameters1T
Activated Parameters32B
Number of Layers (Dense layer included)61
Number of Dense Layers1
Attention Hidden Dimension7168
MoE Hidden Dimension (per Expert)2048
Number of Attention Heads64
Number of Experts384
Selected Experts per Token8
Number of Shared Experts1
Vocabulary Size160K
Context Length256K
Attention MechanismMLA
Activation FunctionSwiGLU

3. Evaluation Results

Reasoning Tasks

BenchmarkSettingK2 ThinkingGPT-5 (High)Claude Sonnet 4.5 (Thinking)K2 0905DeepSeek-V3.2Grok-4
HLE (Text-only)no tools23.926.319.8*7.919.825.4
w/ tools44.941.7*32.0*21.720.3*41.0
heavy51.042.0---50.7
AIME25no tools94.594.687.051.089.391.7
w/ python99.199.6100.075.258.1*98.8
heavy100.0100.0---100.0
HMMT25no tools89.493.374.6*38.883.690.0
w/ python95.196.788.8*70.449.5*93.9
heavy97.5100.0---96.7
IMO-AnswerBenchno tools78.676.0*65.9*45.876.0*73.1
GPQAno tools84.585.783.474.279.987.5

General Tasks

BenchmarkSettingK2 ThinkingGPT-5 (High)Claude Sonnet 4.5 (Thinking)K2 0905DeepSeek-V3.2
MMLU-Prono tools84.687.187.581.985.0
MMLU-Reduxno tools94.495.395.692.793.7
Longform Writingno tools73.871.479.862.872.5
HealthBenchno tools58.067.244.243.846.9

Agentic Search Tasks

BenchmarkSettingK2 ThinkingGPT-5 (High)Claude Sonnet 4.5 (Thinking)K2 0905DeepSeek-V3.2
BrowseCompw/ tools60.254.924.17.440.1
BrowseComp-ZHw/ tools62.363.0*42.4*22.247.9
Seal-0w/ tools56.351.4*53.4*25.238.5*
FinSearchComp-T3w/ tools47.448.5*44.0*10.427.0*
Framesw/ tools87.086.0*85.0*58.180.2*

Coding Tasks

BenchmarkSettingK2 ThinkingGPT-5 (High)Claude Sonnet 4.5 (Thinking)K2 0905DeepSeek-V3.2
SWE-bench Verifiedw/ tools71.374.977.269.267.8
SWE-bench Multilingualw/ tools61.155.3*68.055.957.9
Multi-SWE-benchw/ tools41.939.3*44.333.530.6
SciCodeno tools44.842.944.730.737.7
LiveCodeBenchV6no tools83.187.0*64.0*56.1*74.1
OJ-Bench (cpp)no tools48.756.2*30.4*25.5*38.2*
Terminal-Benchw/ simulated tools (JSON)47.143.851.044.537.7
  1. To ensure a fast, lightweight experience, we selectively employ a subset of tools and reduce the number of tool call steps under the chat mode on kimi.com. As a result, chatting on kimi.com may not reproduce our benchmark scores. Our agentic mode will be updated soon to reflect the full capabilities of K2 Thinking.

  2. Testing Details:  2.1. All benchmarks were evaluated at temperature = 1.0 and 256 k context length for K2 Thinking, except for SciCode, for which we followed the official temperature setting of 0.0.  2.2. HLE (no tools), AIME25, HMMT25, and GPQA were capped at a 96k thinking-token budget, while IMO-Answer Bench, LiveCodeBench and OJ-Bench were capped at a 128k thinking-token budget. Longform Writing was capped at a 32k completion-token budget.  2.3. For AIME and HMMT (no tools), we report the average of 32 runs (avg@32). For AIME and HMMT (with Python), we report the average of 16 runs (avg@16). For IMO-AnswerBench, we report the average of 8 runs (avg@8).

  3. Baselines:  3.1 GPT-5, Claude-4.5-sonnet, Grok-4 results and DeepSeek-V3.2 results are quoted from the GPT-5 post, GPT-5 for Developers post, GPT-5 system card, claude-sonnet-4-5 post, [grok-4 p

Quoted from the model card on Hugging Face. The full card is behind the Hugging Face link above.

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