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🇺🇸 United States generalistReleased March 2026

Gemma 4 26B-A4B

Google
Open-sourceSelf-hostEU hosting Card data 63/100 Trust Index 92
Verdict

A solid pick for self-hosting and full data control.

Overview

Gemma 4 26B-A4B is the Mixture-of-Experts model in Google's Gemma 4 family: 25.2B total parameters but only 3.8B active per inference, giving it near-4B-model speed. It excels at coding and math reasoning, with a 256K-token context window and native function calling for agentic workflows. On the hardest reasoning benchmark (HLE), scores stay modest, a reminder that frontier-level reasoning still favours heavier models. Apache 2.0 licence and open weights let it run on a single desktop machine, keeping data on-premise for European teams.

Skill profile

Arena Elo1438

Not disclosed

Three independent measures

What people prefer, what the model can do, what the market uses. Each source has its biases and none is enough on its own: we show them side by side, never blended.

Preference
Which answer do people prefer, blind?
1438Elo
Sensitive to answer style and length.
Capability
What can the model do on measured tasks?
16.7/ 100
Aggregates ten evaluations run by Artificial Analysis.
Adoption
What does the market actually use?
0.1 %
#35 on OpenRouter, 30 days
10.5m Hugging Face downloads
Source: OpenRouter (openrouter.ai/rankings), as of 19 Oct 2026. CC BY 4.0
OpenRouter traffic only: measures adoption, not quality, and misses direct use of vendor APIs.

Strengths

  • World-class on Arena
  • Open-source and self-hostable

Limitations

  • API pricing not disclosed

Who is it for

A good fit if…
  • you want to control cost or self-host
  • your data must stay in the EU
Skip it if…

    Ideal use cases

    • Autonomous agents with tool calling
    • Enterprise code generation
    • Long-document analysis
    • Sovereign on-premise deployment

    Access & availability

    Self-hostable (open weights)

    Key specifications

    Context
    256K
    Input price
    —
    Output price
    —
    Speed
    —
    Price not auditedBenchmarks not audited

    What it costs per month

    Estimate from sourced API prices and a hardware tier for self-hosting. Assumptions are editable.

    Via API
    API pricing not published
    Self-hosted
    81.5 € / month
    amortised hardware 63.9 € + energy 17.6 € · or cloud GPU 123 €
    tier : 24-32 GB card (RTX 4090 / 5090) · Q4 ≈ 18 Go

    Assumptions: 36-month amortisation, 0.25 €/kWh, 22 days/month, 1 $ = 0.92 €. Excludes labour, software licences, redundancy.

    nAIvigate Trust Index

    92/100

    What the vendor offers and documents for professional use in Europe. An undocumented criterion counts as zero and stays visible: the score rises when the vendor publishes, not when we assume.

    19/19 criteria documented · 100 % · 12 of them set by rule

    Data100
    5/5 · 30 %
    Sovereignty77
    3/3 · 20 %
    Transparency75
    4/4 · 15 %
    Enterprise100
    5/5 · 20 %
    Licence100
    2/2 · 15 %
    See the criteria▾
    Data
    EU data residencyset by rule
    No transfer outside EUset by rule
    No training on your dataset by rule
    Configurable retentionset by rule
    Zero Data Retentionset by rule
    Sovereignty
    Self-hostable (open weights)
    EU hosting offeredset by rule
    European vendorcountry: US30
    Transparency
    Published licence (URL)
    Public, sourced pricing
    Published compliance commitmentsset by rule
    Subprocessor list publishedset by rule
    Enterprise
    DPA available
    SSO / SAMLset by rule
    SCIM provisioningset by rule
    Audit logsset by rule
    SOC 2 / ISO 27001not applicable
    Vendor private endpointset by rule
    Licence
    Commercial use allowed
    Licence typeapache-2.0
    Full ranking and methodology

    Trust Index badge

    Show this score in your docs, README or security page. It updates automatically.

    nAIvigate Trust Index · Gemma 4 26B-A4B
    [![nAIvigate Trust Index · Gemma 4 26B-A4B](https://naivigate.com/badge/gemma-4-26b-a4b.svg?lang=en)](https://naivigate.com/en/model/gemma-4-26b-a4b)

    Data & compliance

    What we know, line by line, with source and date. These lines feed the Data and Enterprise families of the Trust Index above. GDPR compliance depends on your processing, not on the model alone.

    EU data residencyYes
    Data processing agreement (DPA)N/A· self-hosted: data never leaves
    Transfer outside the EUNo
    Training on your dataNo
    Configurable retentionN/A· self-hosted: data never leaves
    Zero Data RetentionN/A· self-hosted: data never leaves
    Self-hostableYes
    Declared hostingself
    Derived from declared hosting, not verified at source.Need an analysis in your context? Shadow AI Sentinel

    Quality of this card’s data

    63/100

    This score measures the quality of the data on this card: price, context, Elo, licence, documented, sourced and fresh. It measures neither the model nor its compliance: for that, see the Trust Index above.

    6/8 documented · 2/8 primary sources

    API pricingopen weights, no API pricingmissing
    Context windownAIvigate assessment
    Arena EloLMArena, human preferenceindependent
    Benchmarks (MMLU, GPQA, SWE-bench…)missing
    LicencenAIvigate assessment
    Data & complianceself-hosted: derivedderived
    Adoption (Hugging Face)independent
    Hardware requirements (quantizations)computed from model sizederived

    Run it locally

    Desktop with solid GPU / 32GB+ Mac10.5M2k
    QuantizationDiskRAM / VRAMTypical hardware
    Q4 · recommended14.8 GB18 GB32GB PC / 24GB Mac / RTX 4070 Ti+
    Q8 · balanced27.8 GB33 GB64GB Mac / dual 24GB GPUs
    FP16 · max quality52 GB59 GB96-128GB Mac Studio / 4× GPUs

    Estimates for a moderate context. Long contexts need more RAM (KV cache).

    Deploy

    Copy-ready commands generated from this card. Adjust context length and GPU count to your hardware.

    Estimated memory · FP16 59 Go · Q4 18 Go

    OpenAI-compatible server for production on NVIDIA GPUs.

    pip install vllm
    vllm serve google/gemma-4-26B-A4B-it \
      --max-model-len 32768 \
      --tensor-parallel-size 1 \
      --dtype auto
    google/gemma-4-26B-A4B-it
    Advanced data · for experts
    Architecture, modalities, detailed cost, full benchmarks
    ▾
    Architecture
    MoE
    Size
    26B (MoE, 4B actifs)
    Cutoff date
    —
    Inputs
    text
    Outputs
    text
    License
    apache-2.0
    Hosting
    self
    Hallucination score
    —
    Estimated cost (API)
    Typical exchange (~3k in / 1k out)
    Not disclosed
    1M in + 1M out
    Not disclosed
    All benchmarks
    Arena Elo1438
    MMLU—
    GPQA—
    HumanEval—
    SWE-Bench—
    MATH—

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