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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.
For feature compatibility and conflict information between features, see Feature Compatibility.

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.
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.
For the hardware specifications (memory per die, dies per card), see Ascend NPU Reference — Hardware.

Installation

Ensure sufficient disk space before pulling images. The Docker image requires at least 30GB of free space.
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.
Command
  • If the model weights have already been downloaded to a shared directory, use -v to mount the model path into the container, for example: -v /path/to/models:/models.
  • Replace ${NAME} with your own container name or remove --name to use default name.

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:
Expected result: an HTTP 200 response with the generated text containing “Paris”. Once the server prints 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.

Accuracy evaluation

For accuracy evaluation methods and datasets, see Accuracy Evaluation on Ascend NPU.

Performance

For performance data and benchmark commands, see Performance Testing on Ascend NPU.

Best practices

Best practice configuration reference

Qwen3.8-Max has no standalone best practice page yet, as tuning parameters are not finalized. Instead, the Online service deployment section above provides a ready-to-use script for multi-node deployment, which embeds the recommended feature combinations and tuning parameters (e.g., DP attention, DeepEP, overlap schedule). For the full catalog of optimization features and their parameter and compatibility details, see Optimization on Ascend NPU.

Performance tuning

For the full list of supported features, see Supported features. For detailed optimization guidance, see Optimization on Ascend NPU.

FAQ

For common environment, installation, and general parameter issues, please refer to the Ascend NPU FAQ.