NVIDIA releases open Nemotron 3.5 Lightning and NeMo Switchyard model router
Confirmed
The takeaway
On 2026-08-11 NVIDIA released Nemotron 3.5 Lightning, an open 30B-parameter (3B active) mixture-of-experts model for long-running agentic workloads that runs on a single laptop/desktop GPU, plus NeMo Switchyard, open software that routes sub-tasks between models.
Status
- Claim
Confirmed
- Our reporting
- High confidence
- Importance
- 3 of 5
- Last verified
- 29 September 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 Astra103 days after its cutoff
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None of these four assistants can know about it. The closest, Claude Opus 5.5, stops 42 days before it.
Key facts
- Released 2026-08-11
- Nemotron 3.5 Lightning: 30B-parameter MoE (Hugging Face id NVIDIA-Nemotron-3.5-Lightning-30B-A3B-NVFP4)
- NVIDIA claims up to 4x faster output and 30% faster agentic task completion vs models in its class
- NeMo Switchyard routing: frontier accuracy at nearly one-third the task cost of Opus 4.8 alone (NVIDIA)
- Partner results: Ramp cut costs 58% and runtime 33%; Cognition cut mean cost 28%; Boomi 100% domain-routing accuracy
- Runs on RTX PCs, DGX Spark, DGX Station, Jetson; open weights, data and techniques
- Reported (Aug 2026): Nemotron 4 in training, largest version at least 1 trillion parameters, possibly ready late autumn
What happened
NVIDIA shipped Nemotron 3.5 Lightning, an efficiency-focused open MoE model meant to serve as a fast worker inside multi-agent systems, alongside NeMo Switchyard, which decides which model handles each part of a workflow (code review, tool use, alert triage, billing questions). NVIDIA frames this as “systems of models” rather than one giant model.
Why it matters
NVIDIA is now a significant American open-weight model developer; cheap local MoE workers plus routing directly target the cost of long-running agents, which dominate 2026 inference demand.
“3B active” is inferred from the model id suffix A3B. Nemotron 4 details are press reports, not official.
Sources
5 sources from 5 sites. Numbers match the chips in the text.
5 sources: 3 primary, 2 press
Primary
- NVIDIA Blog - Nemotron 3.5 Lightning and NeMo Switchyardblogs.nvidia.com, official
- Hugging Face - NVIDIA-Nemotron-3.5-Lightning-30B-A3B-NVFP4huggingface.co, code
- GitHub - NVIDIA-NeMo/Switchyardgithub.com, code
Press
Changes
- Filed
