Run MiniMax M3 in the EU through an OpenAI-compatible API

MiniMax M3 was released by the Shanghai-based company MiniMax on 1 June 2026. It is a mixture-of-experts model with roughly 428 billion parameters, of which about 23 billion are active per token. It was trained on mixed modalities from the first step, so text, images and video are part of one model rather than bolted on.

Its context reaches one million tokens thanks to MiniMax Sparse Attention, which MiniMax says gives 9 times faster prefill and 15 times faster decoding than M2 at that length. MiniMax describes M3 as the first open-weight model to combine frontier coding, million-token context and native multimodality, and says it can also operate a desktop computer.

M3 is built for long agent tasks: coding, research, office-style work across documents and screens, and computer use where the model reads screenshots and decides on the next click. With about 23 billion active parameters it is moderately priced to run for its capability, and its adaptive reasoning mode decides by itself when extra thinking is worth it.

Its licence is more restrictive than MIT or Apache: commercial use is allowed but comes with an attribution requirement and a list of prohibited uses, including military purposes. On the hardest long-horizon coding tasks, Kimi K3 or GLM-5.3 can go further. Like other Chinese models, its training reflects its maker's choices on sensitive topics.

inference.eu supports the OpenAI and the Anthropic request formats. Set the base URL to the inference.eu API, use your inference.eu key and set the model to minimax-m3. Coding agents and frameworks that accept a custom endpoint work without further changes.

M3 has three reasoning modes through the thinking parameter: enabled always reasons, adaptive lets the model decide, and disabled skips reasoning for lower latency and higher throughput. MiniMax recommends temperature 1.0 and top_p 0.95. Send images as image_url content parts next to your text. Tool calls and streaming work as usual.

On inference.eu, MiniMax M3 runs on infrastructure in the European Union. Prompts, images, video frames and the model's responses are processed in EU data centres, are not sent to MiniMax in China, and are never used to train any model.

Every customer gets a data processing agreement under Article 28 of the GDPR and our subprocessor list. Billing is in euros. Under the MiniMax Community License, if you use M3 in a commercial product you must display "Built with MiniMax M3" on a related website, interface or documentation and send MiniMax a one-time notice; above 20 million US dollars of yearly revenue you need its written authorisation.