Arctic Instruct, DBRX Instruct, and Mixtral 8x22B Instruct all arrived in 2024 as enterprise-backed MoE models attempting to bring large-scale open-weights inference within reach. Each comes from a company with a specific data infrastructure angle — Snowflake, Databricks, and Mistral respectively — and that context shapes what each model is actually good at. Snowflake Arctic Instruct has 480B total parameters and roughly 17B active per token, built on a hybrid 10B dense backbone plus 128 sparse experts. It was optimized specifically for enterprise SQL generation and structured data retrieval, where its internal benchmarks showed strong results relative to similarly priced alternatives at launch. The 4K context ceiling is a hard constraint that rules it out for anything document-length. Apache 2.0 license. Hosted availability is limited as of 2026. DBRX Instruct from Databricks has 132B total and 36B active parameters across 16 experts, released March 2024 with a 32K context window. The finer-grained routing was a deliberate design choice over Mixtral 8x7B's architecture; DBRX outperformed it at launch on MMLU, HumanEval, and several reasoning tasks. The Databricks Open Model License permits commercial use but is not OSI-approved. Its main relevance now is for teams already in the Databricks ecosystem. Mixtral 8x22B Instruct is Mistral's 141B total / 39B active MoE with 64K context, released under Apache 2.0 — the most permissive license among the three. It is the broadest-purpose model here, hosting widely across Fireworks, DeepInfra, and OpenRouter, and the safest general choice when you are not embedded in either Snowflake or Databricks infrastructure. Pick Arctic for SQL-heavy structured data pipelines in Snowflake environments. Pick DBRX for Databricks-native workflows. Pick Mixtral 8x22B for general-purpose use cases with maximum license flexibility and provider choice.