Nemotron 3.5 Lightning
Key facts · verified Oct 29, 2026
Nemotron 3.5 Lightning is a NVIDIA model released on 11 Aug 2026. Pricing: Free — open weights, self-hosted (no first-party API pricing). Its context window is 1M tokens (256k in NVIDIA’s single-H100 config). It ranks #217 on LMArena's text leaderboard (Elo 1353, read 1 Nov 2026). Source: huggingface.co.
NVIDIA’s Nemotron 3.5 Lightning, released 11 August 2026: a 30-billion-parameter hybrid Mamba-2 / MoE / attention model with just 3 billion parameters active per token, published under the commercially-approved OpenMDW License 1.1. Inference cost tracks a 3B model while capacity tracks a 30B one, which is what lets it run agentic workloads on a single H100 or A100 80GB, including in a workstation. Context reaches 1M tokens, though NVIDIA’s own single-GPU configuration uses 256k.
Free — open weights, self-hosted (no first-party API pricing)
1M tokens (256k in NVIDIA’s single-H100 config)
Key Features
Full Specifications
Free — open weights, self-hosted (no first-party API pricing) | |
|---|---|
| Identity | |
| Developer | NVIDIA |
| Released | Aug 2026 |
| Status | GA |
| Licence | OpenMDW License Agreement 1.1 (approved for commercial use) |
| Self-hostable | Yes — 1x H100 80GB or 1x A100 80GB; also Blackwell (GB200, B200) and Hopper (H200) |
| Cost | |
| Input price | Self-hosted — no first-party API price |
| Output price | Self-hosted — no first-party API price |
| Cached input | Not applicable |
| Batch discount | Not applicable |
| Free tier | Yes — weights are free to download and run |
| Capacity | |
| Context window | 1M tokens (256k in NVIDIA’s single-H100 config) |
| Max output | Not documented |
| Long-context surcharge | Not applicable |
| Capability | |
| Vision in | No — text only |
| Audio in | No |
| Function calling | Yes — tool calling via vLLM |
| Structured output | Yes |
| Extended reasoning | Yes — configurable on/off via chat template (enable_thinking) |
| Web search | No |
| Code execution | No |
| Access | |
| API | Not offered first-party |
| Chat app | No |
| Cloud marketplaces | NVIDIA NIM / build.nvidia.com |
| Fine-tuning | Yes — open weights permit it |
| Measured quality | |
| LMArena Elo | 1353 (checked Nov 2026) |
| LMArena rank | Rank 217 |