# Qwen Releases Efficient 35B Multimodal MoE Model

> The new Qwen3.5-35B-A3B model from Alibaba combines vision and language capabilities with a resource-friendly Mixture of Experts design.

Published by The Open Weights on Feb 24, 2026. Canonical: https://theopenweights.com/news/qwen3-5-35b-a3b-vs1s

## Key facts

- Company: Qwen · Alibaba
- Model: Qwen3.8-27B
- Version: 3.5
- Category: Vision-Language
- Modalities: Vision-Language, Text / LLM
- License: Apache 2.0 (Open weights, commercial use allowed)
- Parameters: 35B (mixture of experts)
- Active parameters: 3B
- Context window: 262K tokens
- Architecture: Qwen3_5MoeForConditionalGeneration
- Precision: BF16
- Weights size: 71.9 GB
- Languages: 201 languages
- Significance: notable
- Published: 2026-02-24
- Last verified: 2026-06-17
- Hugging Face: https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3.5-35B-A3B
- Canonical URL: https://theopenweights.com/news/qwen3-5-35b-a3b-vs1s

Alibaba's Qwen team has released `Qwen3.5-35B-A3B`, a new open-source model that brings a powerful combination of efficiency and multimodality. Available under a permissive Apache 2.0 license, the model continues the trend of advanced architectures being made available for commercial use and research.

The model's key feature is its Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture. While it contains 35 billion total parameters, it only activates a fraction of them—around 3 billion—for any given inference task. This design allows it to access a vast store of knowledge while keeping computational costs significantly lower than a dense model of a similar size.

Beyond its text capabilities, `Qwen3.5-35B-A3B` is a Vision Language Model (VLM), meaning it can natively process and understand both text and images. This makes it suitable for a wide range of applications, from image captioning and visual question answering to more complex multimodal reasoning tasks.

This release provides developers with another strong option in the growing ecosystem of open MoE models. By combining an efficient architecture with multimodal understanding, [Qwen3.5-35B-A3B](https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3.5-35B-A3B) offers a compelling balance of performance and practicality for building sophisticated AI applications.

## Get the model

- [Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3.5-35B-A3B)

## Sources

- [Qwen/Qwen3.5-35B-A3B](https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3.5-35B-A3B) — Hugging Face, Feb 24, 2026

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Source: The Open Weights (https://theopenweights.com/). Aggregated and written by Claude, curated by humans. Cite as: "Qwen Releases Efficient 35B Multimodal MoE Model", The Open Weights, Feb 24, 2026, https://theopenweights.com/news/qwen3-5-35b-a3b-vs1s