Model fiche
Salamandra 40B Instruct
By BSC · Spain
chat
general
multilingual
fr
Overview
BSC's 40B scaled-up Salamandra covering 35 EU languages with native Catalan support — though the HuggingFace repo is gated and successor ALIA-40B is now available.
When to pick this model
- EU-sovereign workloads needing 40B-class quality
- Romance-language content generation, especially Catalan
- Public-sector and regulated deployments in Europe
- Multilingual research baselines across 35 EU languages
- Workflows already provisioned for ALIA-40B comparisons
VRAM requirements by quantization
| Quantization | VRAM required |
|---|---|
| Q4_K_M (recommended) | 24 GB |
| Q5_K_M | 29 GB |
| Q8_0 | 43 GB |
| FP16 (no quantization) | 80 GB |
VRAM figures include model weights plus a typical 8k KV cache and ~600 MB runtime overhead (Ollama / llama.cpp baseline). Add headroom for higher context lengths.
Strengths
- Sovereign European model purpose-built for Romance languages
- Unique native Catalan capability among open models
- Apache 2.0 license
- 7.68T tokens with strong Iberian-language coverage
Limitations
- ~24 GB VRAM at Q4
- 8192-token context limits modern long-context use
- Limited fine-tune ecosystem and gated repo access
Architecture & training
Architecture: Dense · 40B · BSC MareNostrum · sovereign Romance languages
Training: Barcelona Supercomputing Center — 7.68T tokens, strong in Catalan, Spanish, French, Occitan.
Verdict
The strongest open model for Catalan and Iberian Romance languages — but check ALIA-40B first if you can run either.
Quick start
ollama pull hf.co/BSC-LT/salamandra-40b-instruct-GGUFOr use the open-source MCP server to query this model from Claude Desktop, Cursor, or any MCP-compatible client.