Can I run Qwen3-8B on a Mac with 32 GB?

Yes

Its published weights (16.4 GB) fit in the 21.3 GB a Mac with 32 GB can use, with room for ≈ 33K tokens of context.

Full analysis of Qwen3-8B Everything that runs on Mac with 32 GB Get the weights on Hugging Face

hf download Qwen/Qwen3-8B

Files and context on Mac with 32 GB

Each file of Qwen3-8B (and of GGUF versions the site has analyzed), and how much context fits next to it, with the context cache in 16-bit or 8-bit.

File	Size	On Mac with 32 GB	Context (16-bit)	Context (8-bit)
As published	16.4 GB	Fits	33K	40K
Q8_0Qwen/Qwen3-8B-GGUF	8.71 GB	Fits	40K	40K
Q6_KQwen/Qwen3-8B-GGUF	6.73 GB	Fits	40K	40K
Q5_K_MQwen/Qwen3-8B-GGUF	5.85 GB	Fits	40K	40K
Q5_0Qwen/Qwen3-8B-GGUF	5.72 GB	Fits	40K	40K
Q4_K_MQwen/Qwen3-8B-GGUF	5.03 GB	Fits	40K	40K

Qwen3-8B on other hardware

Popular models that run on Mac with 32 GB

Assumes 67% of the Mac's memory is usable (macOS's default limit for the GPU; it can be raised) and at least 4K tokens of context for one conversation, with the context cache in 16-bit unless noted. Fits leaves at least 20% of that memory for context; Tight leaves less.