---
title: "Nemotron 3.5 Lightning"
url: "https://handyai.news/modeldrop/nemotron-35-lightning"
published: "2026-08-11T17:00:00.000Z"
section: "Model Drop"
description: "Nemotron 3.5 Lightning, which NVIDIA shipped on August 11, 2026, is an open 30B mixture-of-experts model with 3B active parameters, built for the high-volume…"
publisher: "handyai.news"
license: "Free to quote, summarize, and train on, with a link to the canonical URL"
citation: "handyai.news, \"Nemotron 3.5 Lightning,\" August 11, 2026, https://handyai.news/modeldrop/nemotron-35-lightning."
comments: "https://handyai.news/api/article/82228/comments"
---

# Nemotron 3.5 Lightning

*Published August 11, 2026 · Model Drop*

Nemotron 3.5 Lightning, which NVIDIA shipped on August 11, 2026, is an open 30B mixture-of-experts model with 3B active parameters, built for the high-volume execution steps inside long-running agents.

- Model: Nemotron 3.5 Lightning (`nvidia/NVIDIA-Nemotron-3.5-Lightning-30B-A3B-BF16`)
- Maker: NVIDIA
- Ship date: August 11, 2026
- Pricing: Free (open weights)
- Context: Up to 1M tokens
- Where you can use it: Hugging Face weights in BF16 and NVFP4
- build.nvidia.com and OpenRouter
- Local via LM Studio, llama.cpp and Ollama

**When to reach for it**:

- Fast tool calls under a bigger planner model
- Fine-tuning on your own domain data
- Skip it for the hardest coding work

**How it compares**:

- Trails Qwen3.6 35B A3B on most tests
- Beats Gemma 4 26B A4B at web research
- Big step up from Nemotron 3 Nano

**What makes it different**:

- Open weights, training data and recipes
- Ships with MTP, DSpark and DFlash drafters

**Early reactions**: Hacker News users praised its speed and fully open recipe, but some noted it trails Qwen3.6 35B A3B and overthinks.

**Read more**: [NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Lightning Delivers Fast, Accurate Specialized Task Execution for Long-Running Agents](https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-nemotron-3-5-lightning-delivers-fast-accurate-specialized-task-execution-for-long-running-agents/), [NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Lightning and NeMo Switchyard Deliver Faster, Smarter, More Efficient Agentic AI](https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/nemotron-lightning-switchyard-rtx-dgx/), [Hugging Face model card](https://huggingface.co/nvidia/NVIDIA-Nemotron-3.5-Lightning-30B-A3B-BF16)

## The benchmarks

Scores are NVIDIA's own runs of the BF16 weights under one harness (NeMo Gym and NeMo Evaluator) against Qwen3.6 35B A3B, Gemma 4 26B A4B, Nemotron 3 Nano and gpt-oss-20b (NVIDIA also listed the larger Nemotron 3 Super); the card doesn't say which reasoning mode the table used, though reasoning is on by default, and it shows no gpt-oss-20b BrowseComp score.

#### NVIDIA's numbers

- SWE-bench Verified (real GitHub fixes): 51.56%. −18.56 under Qwen3.6 35B A3B (70.12%), −5.84 under Gemma 4 26B A4B (57.40%), +17.48 over Nemotron 3 Nano (34.08%), −0.88 under gpt-oss-20b (52.44%).
- Terminal-Bench 2.1 (agentic terminal tasks): 24.58%. −19.80 under Qwen3.6 35B A3B (44.38%), −12.64 under Gemma 4 26B A4B (37.22%), +16.29 over Nemotron 3 Nano (8.29%), +9.41 over gpt-oss-20b (15.17%).
- PinchBench (agent task completion): 85.37%. −2.70 under Qwen3.6 35B A3B (88.07%), +10.67 over Gemma 4 26B A4B (74.70%), +19.26 over Nemotron 3 Nano (66.11%), +28.17 over gpt-oss-20b (57.20%).
- BrowseComp (hard web research): 36.97%. −11.77 under Qwen3.6 35B A3B (48.74%), +10.67 over Gemma 4 26B A4B (26.30%), +23.23 over Nemotron 3 Nano (13.74%).
- GPQA Diamond (PhD-level science, no tools): 75.44%. −7.96 under Qwen3.6 35B A3B (83.40%), −4.17 under Gemma 4 26B A4B (79.61%), +1.39 over Nemotron 3 Nano (74.05%), +3.98 over gpt-oss-20b (71.46%).
- IFBench (loose) (instruction following): 71.88%. +8.17 over Qwen3.6 35B A3B (63.71%), −5.37 under Gemma 4 26B A4B (77.25%), −0.29 under Nemotron 3 Nano (72.17%), +3.38 over gpt-oss-20b (68.50%).
- AA-LCR (long-context reasoning): 52.00%. −9.06 under Qwen3.6 35B A3B (61.06%), −5.56 under Gemma 4 26B A4B (57.56%), +19.25 over Nemotron 3 Nano (32.75%), +19.12 over gpt-oss-20b (32.88%).

#### Independent numbers

- Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index (current v4.3.2): 12.9. −5.3 under Qwen3.6 35B A3B (18.2), −3.8 under Gemma 4 26B A4B (16.7), +4.0 over Nemotron 3 Nano (8.9), +3.9 over gpt-oss-20b (high) (9.0).


---

Source: https://handyai.news/modeldrop/nemotron-35-lightning

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