Run Qwen3 235B A22B Instruct in the EU through an OpenAI-compatible API

Qwen3 235B A22B Instruct, released as version 2507, is a mixture-of-experts language model from the Qwen team at Alibaba Cloud. It has 235 billion parameters in total, of which 22 billion are active for each token, so it has the knowledge of a very large model while doing roughly the work of a 22B model per token.

It runs in non-thinking mode only: it answers directly and does not produce a reasoning block first. Its native context window is 262,144 tokens. Qwen describes the 2507 update as bringing better instruction following, broader long-tail knowledge across many languages and stronger long-context understanding. It is released under the Apache 2.0 licence.

This model is a strong general-purpose choice for chat, writing, summarisation, translation and tool use where you want fast, direct answers rather than long chains of thought. The 256K context lets it read entire contract bundles, large codebases or long transcripts in one request, and its multilingual knowledge covers the main European languages well.

Because it never thinks before answering, it is weaker than reasoning models on competition-style maths, hard logic puzzles and long agentic coding tasks. It accepts text only, so images need a multimodal model such as Qwen3.8 27B. It is also older than the Qwen3.6 and Qwen3.8 releases, which match or beat it on many tasks at a much smaller size.

inference.eu uses the OpenAI request format, so the OpenAI SDKs for Python and JavaScript, LangChain, LlamaIndex and most agent frameworks work without changes. Point the base URL at the inference.eu API, use your inference.eu key, and set the model to qwen3-235b-a22b-instruct.

Streaming, tool calls and JSON output work as usual. There is no need to pass enable_thinking=False, because this version never produces thinking blocks. The Anthropic Messages format is also available, so tools written for Claude can use Qwen3 235B by changing the base URL, key and model name. Your prompts and parsing code stay as they are.

Qwen is developed by Alibaba Cloud in China, but on inference.eu the model runs on infrastructure in the European Union. Your prompts and its responses are processed in EU data centres, they are not sent to Alibaba, and they are never used to train any model.

Every customer receives a data processing agreement under Article 28 of the GDPR together with our list of subprocessors, so you know who processes the data and where. Billing is in euros. The Apache 2.0 licence places no restriction on commercial use, so you can build Qwen3 235B into paid products without a separate agreement with Alibaba.