Model reference · open weights

NVIDIA-Nemotron-3.5-Lightning

NVIDIA-Nemotron-3.5-Lightning is an open-weight language model from nvidia, listed in the AxForge catalogue. AxForge can bring it up on EU-owned hardware for you on request — with the licence handled where one is required.

Licence fee required LLMs nvidia 2 variants 921k downloads/mo
Request a licence + hosting quote All served models Not on the shared API today — deployed on request.

About

What NVIDIA-Nemotron-3.5-Lightning is

NVIDIA-Nemotron-3.5-Lightning-30B-A3B-NVFP4 Model Summary Model Overview Model Developer: NVIDIA Corporation Model Dates: December 2025 - May 2026 Data Freshness: The pre-training data has a cutoff date of September 2025. The post-training data has a cutoff date of May 2026. What is Nemotron? NVIDIA Nemotron™ is a family of open models with open weights, training data, and recipes, delivering leading efficiency and accuracy for building specialized AI agents. Description NVIDIA-Nemotron-3.5-Lightning-30B-A3B-NVFP4 is a large language model (LLM) trained by NVIDIA. The model employs a hybrid Mixture-of-Experts architecture, utilizing interleaved Mamba-2 and MoE layers, along with select Attention layers. The Lightning 3.5 model is released alongside a number of speculative decoding methods for faster text generation. The model has 3B active parameters and 30B parameters in total. This model is ready for commercial use. Quick Start To get quickly started on DGX Spark (GB10) you can use the following command. Grab the model: Run it with vLLM — this recipe uses DSpark speculative decoding, tuned for DGX Spark. (vLLM version: vllm/vllm-openai:v0.27.1) Validated context: 1M tokens (default). For more details on how to deploy and use the model — see the Quick Start Guide below! License/Terms of Use Governing Download Terms: Use of this model is governed by the OpenMDW-1.1 model license. Benchmarks Reasoning Benchmark Evaluations We evaluated our model on the following benchmarks: Accuracy numbers measured by NVIDIA under a consistent harness (NeMo Gym / Nemo Evaluator SDK); they may differ from vendors' self-reported numbers. For reproducibility, the evaluation recipes, installation instructions, and commands for NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Lightning were collected and published in NeMo Gym. The reported results cover the release evaluation suite, including knowledge and reasoning, instruction following, coding, agentic, tool-use, and long-context. Most evaluations use NeMo Gym-native harnesses while a small subset, including SWE-Bench and Terminal-Bench, used NeMo Evaluator natively. The published recipes specify the benchmark-specific containers, prompts, inference parameter

Summarised from the published model card. Read the full card on the HuggingFace links below.

Specifications

What it is

Makernvidia
TypeLanguage models
Parameters (lead)17.8B
Variants2
Runs withtransformers
Released2026-08-04
Popularity921k downloads / month
Likes373
LicenceCommercial licence needed

How it works

How language models work

Your prompttext / messagesTransformerattention over tokensNext-token loopgenerate + streamResponsetext · tool callsA language model reads your tokens and predicts the next one, again and again, streaming the reply back.

Variants

Sizes & precisions

Open weights ship in several sizes and precisions. One page, all the variants — pick the one that fits your GPU. VRAM figures are estimates from model size.

VariantParamsPrecisionVRAMFits 16 GBWeights
NVIDIA-Nemotron-3.5-Lightning-30B-A3B-NVFP417.8BNVFP4Weights ↗
NVIDIA-Nemotron-3.5-Lightning-30B-A3B-BF1631.6BBF16~72.6 GBWeights ↗

Using it via the API

Call it like any OpenAI endpoint

Once AxForge deploys nvidia-nemotron-3-5-lightning for you, it answers on the OpenAI-compatible API — the same base URL and keys as every other model. (nvidia-nemotron-3-5-lightning below is illustrative; you get the exact model name on deployment.)

$ curl -sS https://api.axforge.ai/v1/chat/completions \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $AXFORGE_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"model":"nvidia-nemotron-3-5-lightning","messages":[{"role":"user","content":"Hello"}]}'

Details

Languages, data & research

Languages

en es fr de it ja

Trained / evaluated on

nvidia/nemotron-post-training-v3 nvidia/nemotron-pre-training-datasets

Tags

transformers safetensors nemotron_h text-generation nvidia pytorch nemotron-3.5 conversational en es fr de it ja

Licence

Commercial licence needed

The weights are open but its licence needs a commercial agreement for business use. AxForge can arrange that licence and host the model for you — you pay AxForge, we settle with the model’s maker. Ask us for a quote. Read the licence ↗

Sources

Weights & code

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