IBM Granite Code 34B Self-Hosted

IBM’s Granite Code family is licensed under Apache 2.0 – cleaner than any other major open coding model. The 34B variant offers solid coding quality on our dedicated GPU hosting with a deployment story suited to enterprises that care about licensing.

Contents

• VRAM
• Deployment
• Licence advantage
• Versus alternatives

VRAM

Deployment

python -m vllm.entrypoints.openai.api_server \
  --model ibm-granite/granite-34b-code-instruct-8k \
  --quantization awq \
  --max-model-len 8192 \
  --gpu-memory-utilization 0.92

Granite Code 34B’s context is 8k in the base instruct variant. Longer-context variants exist (128k) – check the IBM model cards.

Licence

Apache 2.0 is the cleanest licence in the modern open LLM space. You can:

• Ship the model commercially without attribution tax
• Fine-tune and redistribute weights freely
• Use it in proprietary products without ethics riders

For enterprise procurement departments this often simplifies the self-hosted AI case.

Versus Alternatives

Quality ranking (2026): Qwen Coder 32B > Codestral 22B > Granite Code 34B > StarCoder 2 15B. Granite is behind Qwen and Codestral on raw benchmarks but the Apache 2.0 licence can outweigh that delta for certain buyers.

See Qwen Coder 32B and StarCoder 2 15B.