Introduction
Qwen3.8-Max (published as Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B) is a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model with 2.4 trillion total parameters and 95B activated per token. It uses a 92-layer hybrid architecture that combines Gated Delta Network (GDN) linear-attention with full-attention layers. The model has a native context length of 262,144 tokens (extensible to over 1 million) and built-in multi-token prediction (MTP) weights for speculative decoding. This document demonstrates the deployment of Qwen3.8-Max on Ascend NPUs using SGLang, including multi-node PD mixed mode, feature configuration, and performance optimization. Qwen3.8-Max is newly released. This document is validated and written based on the SGLang main branch (daily build). It is recommended to use the latest daily build Docker image, or build SGLang from the main branch source.Supported features
The values in the Example usage column are for illustration only. Adjust them according to your hardware, deployment
mode, and workload. For parameter details, see
Feature descriptions; for
recommended configurations for each deployment scenario, see Best practices.
Prerequisites
Environment
Before following this tutorial, complete the environment setup in the documents below:- Ascend NPU Quickstart — the fastest way to get started. It walks you through launching the official container image, starting the SGLang server, and sending a test request. Recommended if you are new to SGLang on Ascend.
- SGLang Installation with NPU Support — the full installation guide. It covers the component version mapping (CANN, TorchNPU, Triton, kernels, etc.), building from source or from a Dockerfile, and recommended system settings (CPU power scheme, NUMA, swap). Use it when you need to install or customize the environment instead of using the official image.
Model weights
Before downloading model weights, check the model size to reserve enough disk space. For multi-node deployment, download the weights to a shared directory accessible to all nodes.- Qwen/Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B (BF16, approximately 4.8TB)
- You can use msmodelslim to quantize a W4A8 variant from the BF16 checkpoint.
We recommend deploying the W4A8 variant for reduced resource usage and higher throughput.
The validated configuration in this tutorial deploys the W4A8 variant on 4 Atlas 800I A3 nodes (
--tp-size 64, 64 dies
in total). The BF16 checkpoint alone weighs approximately 4.8TB and requires additional nodes.Installation
The dependencies required for the NPU runtime environment have been integrated into a Docker image and uploaded to the online platform. You can directly pull it. The following command is based on the daily build tag, which contains the latest SGLang main branch changes. For details, see Docker image versions.- Atlas 800I A3
Command
Online service deployment
Multi-node online deployment
Multi-node deployment distributes the model across multiple Atlas 800I A3 nodes using tensor parallelism while keeping prefill and decode on the same nodes (PD mixed mode), suitable for scenarios that need more device memory than a single node can provide. The validated configuration deploys the W4A8 quantized checkpoint on 4 nodes with--tp-size 64
(16 dies per node), DP attention (--dp-size 4), and DeepEP in auto mode.
Modify the IP addresses of the four nodes, then run the same script on all four nodes. Each node determines its own
rank by matching the local IP address against IPS.
Functional verification
After the service is started, you can invoke the model by sending a prompt:The server is fired up and ready to roll! in the logs, it is ready to accept requests. For more
testing examples (Health Check, Generate, Chat Completions, and port usage guidance),
see Testing the Service.
