Modular MAX lands Gemma 4, beats vLLM

The interesting part here is less the model release than the infrastructure story: Modular is positioning MAX as the portable serving layer for heterogeneous datacenter fleets, not a one-off benchmark harness.

• –Day-zero support for both Blackwell and AMD hardware is the real differentiator for teams that do not want separate stacks per vendor
• –The 15% vLLM win is credible marketing only if the methodology is clear; decode mix, batching, quantization, and context length can move throughput materially
• –Gemma 4’s 256K context and multimodal inputs raise serving complexity, so a unified inference stack matters more than raw model compatibility
• –Apache 2.0 licensing makes Gemma 4 easier to adopt in private and commercial deployments, which helps infrastructure vendors like Modular sell the portability story
• –This reads as a platform proof point for MAX: open models, OpenAI-compatible serving, and GPU-agnostic deployment in one stack