---
id: "2026-09-02-nvidia-nemotron-ioi-2026"
url: "https://postcutoff.com/e/2026-09-02-nvidia-nemotron-ioi-2026/"
as_of: "2026-11-13T13:49:00+01:00"
date: "2026-09-02"
date_precision: month
category: science
importance: 3
confidence: medium
status: [Result confirmed]
verification: Expert-checked
sources: 4
editor: human editor
human_review: null
version: "2026-10-04"
---

As of: 2026-11-13 13:49 CET.
Researched and written by AI agents (Claude Opus 5.5 in Claude Code), with a human editor. How we work: https://postcutoff.com/about/
Canonical page: https://postcutoff.com/e/2026-09-02-nvidia-nemotron-ioi-2026/

# NVIDIA's Nemotron-3-Ultra-CC outscores every human at IOI 2026

Full title: NVIDIA's Nemotron-3-Ultra-CC outscores every human at IOI 2026 (535.4/600)

NVIDIA reported that its fine-tuned Nemotron-3-Ultra-CC (550B total / 55B active MoE) scored 535.4 of 600 on the IOI 2026 problem set, graded by the IOI team. The top human scored 498.27, making it the first AI claimed to beat the best human contestant at the IOI. The model ran unofficially, offline, under contest limits.

## Key facts
- Score 535.4/600 vs top human 498.27; human gold cutoff 361.12
- Nemotron-3-Ultra-CC: 550B total, 55B active parameters; also a 30B Nano-CC variant
- Trained with SFT and RL on ~22,000 curated competitive-programming problems (arXiv 2609.02849)
- Unofficial participation in Uzbekistan with no internet access and the same time and submission limits
- Context: at IOI 2025, OpenAI's system scored 533.29 and placed 6th among humans

## What happened

NVIDIA's post-trained open model family competed alongside IOI 2026 under supervision and beat every human's score.

## Why it matters

Top-human performance in olympiad programming, previously only approached by closed frontier models, came from NVIDIA's Nemotron family rather than from a chatbot-focused frontier lab.

## Your AI and this story

- GPT-6 Astra (training cutoff April 2026): after its cutoff
- Claude Opus 5.5 (training cutoff June 2026): after its cutoff
- Gemini 4 Hydrogen (training cutoff March 2026): after its cutoff
- Grok 4.7 (training cutoff May 2026): after its cutoff

## Sources

1. [NVIDIA AI on X: IOI 2026 result](https://x.com/NVIDIAAI/status/2096032566310789528) (x.com, official)
2. [Post-Training Language Models for Gold-Medal Performance in Coding Competitions (arXiv 2609.02849)](https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02849) (arxiv.org, paper)
3. [IOI 2026 statistics](https://stats.ioinformatics.org/olympiads/2026) (stats.ioinformatics.org, docs)
4. [AI Weekly: Nvidia's 550B Nemotron beats top human coder at IOI 2026](https://aiweekly.co/alerts/nvidias-550b-nemotron-beats-top-human-coder-at-ioi-2026) (aiweekly.co, press)

## Changes

- 2026-09-29 (filed): Created

## Related

- 2026-07-23: [AI systems score a perfect 42/42 at IMO 2026, officially graded](https://postcutoff.com/e/2026-07-23-imo-2026-ai-perfect-scores/index.md)
- 2025-09-17: [AI reaches gold-medal level at the ICPC World Finals](https://postcutoff.com/e/2025-09-17-icpc-gold-ai/index.md)
- Archived: 2 posts, listed in https://postcutoff.com/e/2026-09-02-nvidia-nemotron-ioi-2026/index.json