IBM Open-Sources Granite 4.2 Family with 30B Reasoning Flagship under Apache 2.0

On August 25, IBM released the open-source Granite 4.2 family in 3B, 8B, and 30B sizes, all decoder-only dense models under Apache 2.0, free for research and commercial use. The family targets enterprise agent workflows, with day-0 or early support from Ollama, SGLang, and CoreWeave; all three sizes became available on Ollama by August 26.

Confirmed

Flagship Granite-4.2-30B is a dense reasoning model with native <think>...</think> chain-of-thought, 512K context, and three thinking modes
30B benchmarks: AIME25 89.17, HMMT Feb25 89.17, GPQA 66.41
The family supports multilinguality, code, RAG, tool calling, structured JSON output, and built-in thinking, with planning, reasoning, self-correction, and reliable tool use
Blogger @lmoroney notes a "thinking switch" lets users toggle the planning step before inference to compare effects
Granite-4.2-30B trended on Hugging Face, focused on text generation, reasoning, and tool calling
Granite-4.2-8B launched on CoreWeave Serverless Inference on day one

Unconfirmed

@realmrfakename notes IBM provided no comparative evaluations in the tweets, model card, or blog; relative performance awaits third-party verification

Why it matters

Granite 4.2 is another fully open enterprise-grade reasoning model from a major vendor under a permissive license, lowering the barrier to agent workflows (planning, tool use, self-correction); native chain-of-thought, 512K context, and immediate Ollama/SGLang/CoreWeave support make it highly accessible out of the box.

2026-08-25 ~ 2026-08-27 · 8 related posts

Primary sources

IBM Open-Sources Granite-4.2-30B: Built-in Chain-of-Thought, 512K Context, Apache 2.0 — jacek2023 · 2026-08-25 23:10 (UTC+08:00)
IBM Unveils Granite-4.2-30B with Reasoning Capabilities — ibm-granite · 2026-08-27 19:17 (UTC+08:00)
IBM Granite 4.2 open-source models now available on Ollama — ollama · 2026-08-25 23:45 (UTC+08:00)

[source] IBM Open-Sources Granite-4.2-30B: Built-in Chain-of-Thought, 512K Context, Apache 2.0 — jacek2023 · 2026-08-25
IBM Launches Granite 4.2: 30B Reasoning Model with Day-0 SGLang Support — krvarshney · 2026-08-25
[source] IBM Granite 4.2 open-source models now available on Ollama — ollama · 2026-08-25
IBM Granite 4.2 lands on Ollama: open 3B/8B/30B models built for enterprise agents — krvarshney · 2026-08-26
IBM releases Granite 4.2 open models focused on enterprise agentic AI workflows — realmrfakename · 2026-08-26
IBM Granite 4.2 8B Launches on CoreWeave with Native Reasoning — wandb · 2026-08-26
IBM Releases Granite 4.2 Local Reasoners Under Apache 2.0 License — lmoroney · 2026-08-27
[source] IBM Unveils Granite-4.2-30B with Reasoning Capabilities — ibm-granite · 2026-08-27