Model Drop

Nemotron Nano 2

August 18, 2025 1 min read

Nemotron Nano 2, which NVIDIA shipped on August 18, 2025, is a 9B open-weight reasoning model built on a hybrid Mamba-Transformer design, with thinking you can switch off or cap at a token budget.

Model: NVIDIA Nemotron Nano 2 9B (nvidia/NVIDIA-Nemotron-Nano-9B-v2)
Maker: NVIDIA
Ship date: August 18, 2025
Pricing: Free (open weights)
Context: 128K tokens
Where you can use it:
- Hugging Face weights, NVIDIA Open Model License
- build.nvidia.com endpoint, NIM coming
When to reach for it:
- Reasoning agents on a single A10G-class GPU
- Long thinking traces where speed matters
- Skip it if you need llama.cpp at launch
How it compares:
- Much faster than Qwen3-8B on long outputs
- gpt-oss-20b has a looser Apache 2.0 license
What makes it different:
- Mostly Mamba-2 layers, just four attention
- Thinking on/off plus a runtime token budget
Early reactions: Hugging Face users pressed for GGUF builds, which waited on new llama.cpp support, and some argued it trades general knowledge for STEM scores.
Read more: Supercharge Edge AI With High-Accuracy Reasoning Using NVIDIA Nemotron Nano 2 9B, NVIDIA Nemotron Nano 2 and the Nemotron Pretraining Dataset v1, Model card, Technical report

The benchmarks

NVIDIA ran every eval itself with NeMo-Skills, reasoning on except RULER (reasoning off), and printed only Qwen3-8B as a rival; the 9B leads on every row NVIDIA published, so there is no maker row where it trails.

NVIDIA's numbers

AIME 2025 (competition math): 72.1%. +2.8 over Qwen3-8B (69.3%).
MATH-500 (competition math problems): 97.8%. +1.5 over Qwen3-8B (96.3%).
GPQA Diamond (PhD-level science): 64.0%. +4.4 over Qwen3-8B (59.6%).
LiveCodeBench (competitive coding): 71.1%. +11.6 over Qwen3-8B (59.5%).
Humanity's Last Exam (expert-level questions): 6.5%. +2.1 over Qwen3-8B (4.4%).
IFEval (instruction following, strict): 90.3%. +0.9 over Qwen3-8B (89.4%).
BFCL v3 (function calling): 66.9%. +0.6 over Qwen3-8B (66.3%).
RULER (128K) (long-context recall, reasoning off): 78.9%. +4.8 over Qwen3-8B (74.1%).

Independent numbers

Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index (current v4.3.2, AA estimate): 7.4. +2.2 over Qwen3-8B (5.2), −1.6 under gpt-oss-20b (9.0).