Gemma 4 12B
Hugging Face (open weights) Open weights
The catch: Outputs text only (no image or speech generation).
| Access | Open weights |
|---|---|
| Free limits | Free to download and self-host; you pay only for your own compute. 11.95B dense; reads text, images, video and audio; 256K-token context. Released 23 May 2026. Google also publishes QAT 4-bit copies. |
| Modality | text, code, image, video, audio |
| Credit card | Not required |
| Commercial use | Allowed |
| Trains on your data | – |
| Licence or terms | Apache-2.0 |
| Context window | 262,144 tokens |
| Model id | google/gemma-4-12B-it |
| Base URL | – |
| Last checked | 8 Oct 2026 |
How to use Gemma 4 12B
Download the weights and serve them yourself; the quickstart below shows one way. Licence: Apache-2.0.
Quickstart
vllm serve google/gemma-4-12B-it # then: curl http://localhost:8000/v1/chat/completions -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"model":"google/gemma-4-12B-it","messages":[{"role":"user","content":"Hello"}]}'Paste into Claude Code
I want to run the open-weight model "Gemma 4 12B" (google/gemma-4-12B-it) for my project. Please: 1. Check the model card and tell me the hardware it needs and the simplest way to serve it (vLLM, SGLang, Ollama or a hosted endpoint). 2. Give me a minimal working setup and a test request. 3. Tell me the licence terms for commercial use. 4. If a cheaper or smaller variant would do the job, mention it.
Before you ship on it
- Outputs text only (no image or speech generation).
- Apache-2.0 (licence tag on the HF repo, linking ai.google.dev/gemma/docs/gemma_4_license): use, modify, distribute and sell, including commercially; keep the licence and notices when you redistribute.
- Free to run means you pay for the GPUs, the serving stack and the on-call.
Questions
Is Gemma 4 12B free?
Yes. Open weights offers it as open weights, with these limits: Self-host free · Apache-2.0. No credit card is needed.
Can I use Gemma 4 12B commercially?
Yes, under Apache-2.0. Check the current terms before you ship.
How do I start with Gemma 4 12B?
Download the weights and serve them yourself; the quickstart below shows one way. Licence: Apache-2.0.
Source: huggingface.co/google/gemma-4-12B-it, checked 8 Oct 2026.