MiniMax M3
A solid pick for self-hosting and full data control.
Overview
MiniMax M3 is a Chinese open-weight MoE model, 428 billion parameters with roughly 23 billion active, built for coding and agentic workloads with a one-million-token context window. Self-hosted, it keeps all data on the user's own infrastructure regardless of the vendor's country. The real caveat lies elsewhere: the MiniMax Community licence is still unclear on commercial use, and prior releases (M2.7, H3) carried territorial restrictions including the EU — worth reading closely before any professional deployment.
Skill profile
Not disclosed
Strengths
- Very long context
- Open-source and self-hostable
Limitations
- API pricing not disclosed
Who is it for
- you want to control cost or self-host
- your data must stay in the EU
Ideal use cases
- Internal R&D prototyping
- Experimental coding agents
- Long-document analysis
- Long-context task automation
Access & availability
Key specifications
What it costs per month
Estimate from sourced API prices and a hardware tier for self-hosting. Assumptions are editable.
Assumptions: 36-month amortisation, 0.25 €/kWh, 22 days/month, 1 $ = 0.92 €. Excludes labour, software licences, redundancy.
nAIvigate Trust Index
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
See the criteria▾
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[](https://naivigate.com/en/model/minimax-m3)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 residency | Yes |
| Data processing agreement (DPA) | N/A· self-hosted: data never leaves |
| Transfer outside the EU | No |
| Training on your data | No |
| Configurable retention | N/A· self-hosted: data never leaves |
| Zero Data Retention | N/A· self-hosted: data never leaves |
| Self-hostable | Yes |
| Declared hosting | self |
Quality of this card’s data
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.
3/8 documented · 0/8 primary sources
| API pricingopen weights, no API pricing | missing | |
| Context window | nAIvigate assessment | |
| Arena Elo | missing | |
| Benchmarks (MMLU, GPQA, SWE-bench…) | missing | |
| Licence | nAIvigate assessment | |
| Data & complianceself-hosted: derived | derived | |
| Adoption (Hugging Face) | missing | |
| Hardware requirements (quantizations)computed from model size | missing |
Advanced data · for expertsArchitecture, modalities, detailed cost, full benchmarks▾
| Arena Elo | — |
| MMLU | — |
| GPQA | — |
| HumanEval | — |
| SWE-Bench | — |
| MATH | — |