No longer limited to the research lab or the local workstation, Apertus is being deployed across a vibrant ecosystem from on‑premise deployments to high‑throughput APIs. Find out more in this update.
Apertus 1.5 adds image understanding competitive with leading open-weight models at scale, experimental audio understanding, stronger tool use, and thinking mode from our second-generation post-training pipeline. You can read more about this in our July announcement.
Some of these capabilities need to be enabled through configuration changes and upgrades on the inference side. Pioneering organizations have gone above-and-beyond to support our work this summer, in some cases contributing their engineer’s expertise and code commits to key open source components to benefit the entire community.
We are grateful to evaluators and contributors at Artificialy, Begasoft, Exoscale, Federal Court (BGER), Infomaniak, Liip, OnPrem.ai, Phoeniqs, Public AI, Puzzle AG, stepping stone, Swisscom, Switch and VSHN who participated in the pre-release feedback round.
General availability
The fully open model is available for download in two configurations - an 8B version that runs on many laptops and workstations, and the full-scale 70B parameter model for server-class hardware. For most people who do not wish to bother with installing and configuring an LLM, we are glad to announce general availability of third-party services that provide Apertus 1.5.
You can find the links to them at any time on our home page. Instructions for deploying our models to several cloud providers are also available in the technical deployment guides. Please contact us if there are others that you are using.
Swisscom
“The Enterprise Service Cloud (ESC) is the Swiss private cloud for companies, offering IT infrastructure, security, and managed services from a single source – fully integrated, automated, locally hosted, and flexibly scalable.”
🇨🇭 Swisscom is offering 1000 API keys during the Swiss {ai} Weeks
70B ✅ High availability ✅ Security certification ✅ Strategic Partner
Documentation: cloud.swisscom.ch
Infomaniak
“Robust and sovereign European cloud offering LLM access with full data protection, 100 % renewable energy, and a clear no‑logs policy—letting you integrate any open‑source model into your applications while keeping your data securely hosted in Swiss data centers.”
📲 The Euria app supports Apertus 1.5 on mobile phones and in kSuite
70B ✅ Swiss data center ✅ Sustainable design ✅ Code contributor
Get started: AI services
OnPrem AI
“Replace any cloud AI with local enterprise AI servers. It is literally plug&play, thanks to compatible APIs and the latest LLM models, managed through a user-friendly interface.”
🏆 Offers quantized, full-featured Apertus builds at roughly half the rated GPU power of the reference deployment, approximately 35% less energy per generated token than the FP8 alternative, and 99% of FP8 MMLU quality in a 48 GiB checkpoint.
70B ✅ On premise deployment ✅ Consulting support ✅ Code contributor
Details: Blog post
stepping stone
“Use AI models directly on Swiss infrastructure — without sending data abroad. stepping stone offers leading open-source models as a managed service: ready to use, with data sovereignty and personalised support.”
🏃🏻♂️ The model deployment is openly documented and operated on Swiss infrastructure.
8B ✅ Swiss data center ✅ ISO certification ✅ Consulting support
Consult the solution offer
PHOENIQS
“A Swiss sovereign cloud and AI provider that gives organizations full control over their digital infrastructure and data, enabling secure innovation, strategic independence, and scalable growth.”
🪽 The PHOENIQS AI platform brings Apertus to regulated enterprise and public sector workloads.
70B ✅ Swiss data center ✅ Enterprise scalability ✅ Consulting support
Public AI
“The Public AI Inference Utility is a nonprofit, open-source project. Our team builds products and organizes advocacy to support the work of public AI model builders like the Swiss National AI Initiative, AI Singapore, AI Sweden, and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center.”
🤗 Apertus is freely accessible to users of Hugging Face and the wider public, while a not-for-profit Swiss data cooperative brings focus to the vision.
8B & 70B ✅ Free demo ✅ Large community ✅ Social enterprise
Join the growing community
Safe Swiss Cloud
“Choose from a rich catalog of sovereign LLMs – all with the same strict privacy and compliance guarantees. Safe Swiss Cloud’s Private AI (PAI) services combine a broad selection of open-source LLMs with a consistent security, privacy and compliance foundation. You keep full control over data, infrastructure and model choice, while we provide the sovereign hosting and operational excellence”
🌤️ Apertus 1.5 is available, optimized for multilingual dialogue use cases.
70B ✅ Swiss data center ✅ ISO certification ✅ Integration support
Get started with fully private AI
What This Means for You
From academic research groups that demand strict data sovereignty to startups that require seamless API access, the breadth of providers ensures that Apertus can be plugged into your workflow in the way that best matches your operational and ethical requirements.
- On‑Premise deployments leverage the model securely behind your own firewalls, ideal for handling sensitive datasets or regulated environments.
- Cloud and SaaS partners deliver ready‑to‑use endpoints, automatic scaling, and simplified billing, letting you focus on building rather than infrastructure.
- Community initiatives like Public AI keep a free or low-cost gateway running on shared compute, preserving inclusivity with an easy way to demo new services.
Please check back on our Get Started website for links, contact us if you are aware of other providers, or have a question about getting Apertus running on another platform.
Looking Ahead
Just as Apertus 1.5 expanded its knowledge base and instruction‑following prowess, this growing partnership network expands its reach without diluting the open‑source principle that powers it.
We thank every provider and contributor who has turned the vision of a truly universal, multilingual LLM into a practical reality, fully in the sense of the Open project that is one of our primary research goals. Here is what’s next on the Apertus Roadmap:
Apertus 2.0 - 2027 - a magnitude larger model, developed to the same standard of transparency and trustworthiness: deeper understanding, better agentic capabilities, a more globally fair vocabulary, reliability in long-running processes, and more.
Further development of Apertus 2.5 will be based on feedback from our users. Stay tuned for the latest updates via our Inside Apertus newsletter. Join us at upcoming events to learn what innovative solutions emerge as developers worldwide integrate these models into new research, products, and services.
If you build with or use Apertus, reach out for a Showcase listing or through our Contact page. Don’t hesitate to send us a link or screenshot of a cool prompt or use case! We will promote them in presentations, give coverage in the News area, as well as make them visible to our network at the ETH and EPFL AI Centers and CSCS.
🌍 Tag #Apertus and connect with us on social media: Mastodon / LinkedIn / X / Bluesky
⭕️ Join the discussion in the community forums on Hugging Face / Discord