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/m/nemotron-3-5-lightning/

# NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Lightning (30B-A3B)

NVIDIA, Nemotron 3.5 family. Status: current. Type: language model. Released: 2026-08-11. Training cutoff: 2025-09.

## How to call it

| Provider | Model id | Endpoint | Docs |
|---|---|---|---|
| NVIDIA API (build.nvidia.com) | `nvidia/nemotron-3.5-lightning-30b-a3b` | https://integrate.api.nvidia.com/v1/chat/completions | https://build.nvidia.com |
| OpenRouter | `nvidia/nemotron-3.5-lightning` |  | https://openrouter.ai/nvidia/nemotron-3.5-lightning |
| Hugging Face |  |  | https://huggingface.co/nvidia/NVIDIA-Nemotron-3.5-Lightning-30B-A3B-BF16 |

## Pricing

- Input: $0.06 per 1M tokens
- Output: $0.16 per 1M tokens
- Unit as published: per 1M tokens (USD) on OpenRouter (also :free variant)
- Source: https://openrouter.ai/nvidia/nemotron-3.5-lightning
- Last checked: 2026-09-29

## Specs

- Input: text
- Output: text
- Context window: 1,000,000 tokens
- Max output: not published
- Open weights: yes
- Licence: openmdw-1.1

## What it has not seen

- Published training cutoff: 2025-09 (September 2025).
- AI events after it on Post-Cutoff: 1,990 (455 major, 86 historic), as of 2026-11-13.
- Already missing at launch: 313.
- Briefings of the news since September 2025: https://postcutoff.com/briefings/cutoff-2025-09-s.md (short), https://postcutoff.com/briefings/cutoff-2025-09-m.md (medium), https://postcutoff.com/briefings/cutoff-2025-09.md (full).
- Its card, with five things it has never heard of: https://postcutoff.com/you/nemotron-3-5-lightning/

## What stands out

- Tiny-active MoE with 1M context: 30B total / 3B active hybrid Mamba-2 + attention MoE with up to 1M context (256K on a single H100). Source: https://huggingface.co/nvidia/NVIDIA-Nemotron-3.5-Lightning-30B-A3B-BF16
- Built for customization: Released with base checkpoint and NVFP4 builds (incl. speculative-decoding DSpark/DFlash variants); intended for fine-tuning and domain adaptation. Source: https://huggingface.co/nvidia/NVIDIA-Nemotron-3.5-Lightning-30B-A3B-BF16

## Notes

Successor to Nemotron 3 Nano 30B-A3B (nvidia/nemotron-nano-3-30b-a3b on NIM). Knowledge cutoff = pre-training (Sep 2025); post-training to May 2026.

Fast, cheap small open model for high-throughput agents and fine-tuning.

```bash
curl https://integrate.api.nvidia.com/v1/chat/completions -H "Authorization: Bearer $NVIDIA_API_KEY" -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
 -d '{"model":"nvidia/nemotron-3.5-lightning-30b-a3b","messages":[{"role":"user","content":"Hello"}]}'
```

Sources: https://huggingface.co/nvidia/NVIDIA-Nemotron-3.5-Lightning-30B-A3B-BF16 , https://integrate.api.nvidia.com/v1/models

Model page: https://postcutoff.com/m/nemotron-3-5-lightning/