Tencent Hy3 is the third generation of the Hunyuan model family and has been available as a full release since July 6, 2026 – for the first time under a genuine Apache 2.0 licence without territorial restrictions. That is the real news for European companies: the April preview’s licence still explicitly excluded use in the EU, the UK and South Korea; the final release lifts this restriction.
Architecture: Efficiency over Size
Hy3 is a mixture-of-experts model with 295 billion total and only 21 billion active parameters (192 experts, 8 active per token). Add a 256K token context window, an additional multi-token prediction layer for faster decoding, and a hybrid fast/slow thinking design that toggles between quick replies and deep reasoning. Besides the standard version, an FP8-quantised variant is available for efficient self-hosting.
The positioning is clear: Hy3 is the efficiency play among Chinese open-source models – considerably smaller than DeepSeek V4-Pro (1.6 trillion parameters) and GLM-5.2 (744 billion), with competitive results in most disciplines except coding.
Benchmarks
According to Tencent and independent evaluations, Hy3 achieves, among others, 90.4 on GPQA Diamond, 78% on SWE-bench Verified, 57.9% on SWE-bench Pro and 84.2 on BrowseComp. On demanding maths (MathArena Apex: 38.7 vs. 85.4 for GPT-5.5) and in coding, the model trails the Western flagships and GLM-5.2. For the model size – only 21B active parameters – the results are remarkable.
Availability and Cost
The weights are available on Hugging Face and ModelScope; as an API, Hy3 is offered via Tencent Cloud’s TokenHub (~$0.18 input / $0.59 output per 1M tokens) and via OpenRouter. Within Tencent’s own ecosystem, Hy3 powers the WeChat assistant, Yuanbao and CodeBuddy, among others.
GDPR and Data Sovereignty: Self-Hosting Yes, China API with Caution
For European companies, the same logic applies as with DeepSeek and Qwen: Hy3 is interesting above all as an open-weights model for self-operation. Under Apache 2.0 it can be hosted in your own cloud environment – on STACKIT, Azure or AWS, for example – meaning no data flows to the vendor and full data sovereignty is maintained. The API via Tencent Cloud, by contrast, means processing by a Chinese provider and should be assessed critically from a GDPR perspective for personal or confidential data.
When reviewing the licence, mind the version: only the full release of July 6, 2026 is under Apache 2.0 – anyone still using artifacts of the April preview operates under the old community licence with its EU exclusion.
Positioning Among Chinese Models
| Model | Size (active) | Licence | Distinctive feature |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tencent Hy3 | 295B (21B) | Apache 2.0 | Efficiency, most permissive licence |
| DeepSeek V4 | 1.6T (Pro) | MIT | Reasoning leader among open models |
| GLM-5.2 | 744B | MIT | Coding strength |
| Qwen 3.7 | API-only (Max) | proprietary (Max) | Alibaba ecosystem |
Integration with CompanyGPT
As an open-weights model, Hy3 – like Llama, Qwen or GptOSS – can be integrated into a self-hosted platform such as CompanyGPT and operated GDPR-compliantly in your own cloud. For most enterprise use cases in the DACH region, we continue to recommend the established frontier models via EU endpoints; Hy3 is an exciting option for cost-efficient, sovereignly hosted workloads.
For individual consulting on the right model strategy, contact innFactory AI Consulting.