Model reference · open weights

Kimi-K2

LLMs moonshotai Text gen 3 builds Its own licence terms 163k dl/mo

Kimi-K2 is an open-weight language model from moonshotai. Kimi-K2-Instruct-GGUF (GGUF) weighs 621 GB; the smallest configuration that runs it is 4× B200 180 GB.

  • Kimi-K2 is a text-generation model developed by moonshotai, designed for general-purpose chat and agentic tasks such as tool use and autonomous problem-solving.
  • It features a mixture-of-experts architecture with 1 trillion total parameters and 32 billion activated parameters, supporting a context length of 131,072 tokens.
  • The model is released under a Modified MIT License.

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

What it is

Released bymoonshotai
Released2025-07-11
Parameters1026.4B
VRAM621 GB for the weights

What it runs on

Memory and cards for Kimi-K2-Instruct-GGUF (GGUF)

621 GBweights, file size
70 MBcache per 1K tokens
754 MBruntime overhead, at least
131,072 tokenscontext max
CardRequests at onceContext maxMemory
8K each32K each
RTX 3060 12 GB … 8× A100 80 GB
14 smaller cards
———
4× B200 180 GB
split by layers (llama.cpp)
358all 128K176 GB a card
8× H200 141 GB
split by layers (llama.cpp)
10325all 128K138 GB a card
Memory needed at each load
Requests at once8K tokens each32K tokens each
1622 GB624 GB
5624 GB633 GB
8626 GB640 GB
16631 GB658 GB
32640 GB695 GB
64658 GB769 GB

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

Builds

Sizes, precisions & builds

BuildParamsPrecisionWeightsSmallest setup
Kimi-K2-Instruct ↗ 1026.4BFP8 1029 GB8× B200 180 GB
Kimi-K2-Base ↗ 1026.5BFP8 1029 GB8× B200 180 GB
Kimi-K2-Instruct-GGUF (above) ↗
packaged by unsloth
27 builds: TQ1_0 244 GB … BF16 2053 GB
—GGUF 621 GB4× B200 180 GB

From the model card

What moonshotai says about Kimi-K2

Read the model card

0. Changelog

2025.8.11

  • Messages with name field are now supported. We’ve also moved the chat template to a standalone file for easier viewing.

2025.7.18

  • We further modified our chat template to improve its robustness. The default system prompt has also been updated.

2025.7.15

  • We have updated our tokenizer implementation. Now special tokens like [EOS] can be encoded to their token ids.
  • We fixed a bug in the chat template that was breaking multi-turn tool calls.

1. Model Introduction

Kimi K2 is a state-of-the-art mixture-of-experts (MoE) language model with 32 billion activated parameters and 1 trillion total parameters. Trained with the Muon optimizer, Kimi K2 achieves exceptional performance across frontier knowledge, reasoning, and coding tasks while being meticulously optimized for agentic capabilities.

Key Features

  • Large-Scale Training: Pre-trained a 1T parameter MoE model on 15.5T tokens with zero training instability.
  • MuonClip Optimizer: We apply the Muon optimizer to an unprecedented scale, and develop novel optimization techniques to resolve instabilities while scaling up.
  • Agentic Intelligence: Specifically designed for tool use, reasoning, and autonomous problem-solving.

Model Variants

  • Kimi-K2-Base: The foundation model, a strong start for researchers and builders who want full control for fine-tuning and custom solutions.
  • Kimi-K2-Instruct: The post-trained model best for drop-in, general-purpose chat and agentic experiences. It is a reflex-grade model without long thinking.

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 Length128K
Attention MechanismMLA
Activation FunctionSwiGLU

3. Evaluation Results

Instruction model evaluation results

• Bold denotes global SOTA, and underlined denotes open-source SOTA. • Data points marked with * are taken directly from the model's tech report or blog. • All metrics, except for SWE-bench Verified (Agentless), are evaluated with an 8k output token length. SWE-bench Verified (Agentless) is limited to a 16k output token length. • Kimi K2 achieves 65.8% pass@1 on the SWE-bench Verified tests with bash/editor tools (single-attempt patches, no test-time compute). It also achieves a 47.3% pass@1 on the SWE-bench Multilingual tests under the same conditions. Additionally, we report results on SWE-bench Verified tests (71.6%) that leverage parallel test-time compute by sampling multiple sequences and selecting the single best via an internal scoring model. • To ensure the stability of the evaluation, we employed avg@k on the AIME, HMMT, CNMO, PolyMath-en, GPQA-Diamond, EvalPlus, Tau2. • Some data points have been omitted due to prohibitively expensive evaluation costs.


Base model evaluation results

• We only evaluate open-source pretrained models in this work. We report results for Qwen2.5-72B because the base checkpoint for Qwen3-235B-A22B was not open-sourced at the time of our study. • All models are evaluated using the same evaluation protocol.

4. Deployment

[!Note] You can access Kimi K2's API on https://platform.moonshot.ai , we provide OpenAI/Anthropic-compatible API for you.

The Anthropic-compatible API maps temperature by real_temperature = request_temperature * 0.6 for better compatible with existing applications.

Our model checkpoints are stored in the block-fp8 format, you can find it on Huggingface.

Currently, Kimi-K2 is recommended to run on the following inference engines:

  • vLLM
  • SGLang
  • KTransformers
  • TensorRT-LLM

Deployment examples for vLLM and SGLang can be found in the Model Deployment Guide.


5. Model Usage

Chat Completion

Once the local inference service is up, you can interact with it through the chat endpoint:

def simple_chat(client: OpenAI, model_name: str):
    messages = [
        {"role": "system", "content": "You are Kimi, an AI assistant created by Moonshot AI."},
        {"role": "user", "content": [{"type": "text", "text": "Please give a brief self-introduction."}]},
    ]
    response = client.chat.completions.create(
        model=model_name,
        messages=messages,
        stream=False,
        temperature=0.6,
        max_tokens=256
    )
    print(response.choices[0].message.content)

[!NOTE] The recommended temperature for Kimi-K2-Instruct is temperature = 0.6. If no special instructions are required, the system prompt above is a good default.


Tool Calling

Kimi-K2-Instruct has strong tool-calling capabilities. To enable them, you need to pass the list of available tools in each request, then the model will autonomously decide when and how to invoke them.

The following example demonstrates calling a weather tool end-to-end:

# Your tool implementation
def get_weather(city: str) -> dict:
    return {"weather": "Sunny"}

# Tool schema definition
tools = [{
    "type": "function",
    "function": {
        "name": "get_weather",
        "description": "Retrieve current weather information. Call this when the user asks about the weather.",
        "parameters": {
            "type": "object",
            "required": ["city"],
            "properties": {
                "city": {
                    "type": "string",
                    "description": "Name of the city"
                }
            }
        }
    }
}]

# Map tool names to their implementations
tool_map = {
    "g

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

© 2026 AxForge · EU-hosted AI infrastructure Pricing Docs Trust Privacy Terms