How much does Nemotron 3.5 Lightning cost?

Nemotron 3.5 Lightning is published as open weights (OpenMDW-1.1) — there is no per-token API price. You self-host the model and pay infrastructure cost (GPU rental and operating overhead). Effective cost on commodity 24-48GB GPUs typically lands at $0.10-$0.50 per million output tokens.

What is the context window of Nemotron 3.5 Lightning?

Nemotron 3.5 Lightning supports a context window of 1000K tokens (1,000,000 tokens) and can generate up to 33K output tokens per request.

What is Nemotron 3.5 Lightning best for?

Nemotron 3.5 Lightning is best for: Efficient single-GPU deployment, 1M context. It supports chat, function_calling, code, reasoning capabilities. It is open-source under the OpenMDW-1.1 license.

Nemotron 3.5 Lightning

NVIDIAopen-source NewOpen Source

NVIDIA's 11 Aug 2026 release, the smallest model in the Nemotron 3 family (sibling to Nemotron 3 Ultra, distinct from the catalog's Nemotron 3 Nano Omni). Hybrid Mamba-2 + MoE + attention architecture, 30B total / 3B active params, pretrained on 20T+ tokens with an NVFP4 recipe, under NVIDIA's permissive OpenMDW-1.1 license (open weights, training data, and recipes; commercial use allowed). 1M-token context. Ships with multi-token-prediction draft models (DSpark, DFlash) for speculative decoding and is single-GPU deployable (1x DGX Spark or 1x H100). Alongside it NVIDIA released NeMo Switchyard, an open-source agent-routing library. Vendor-reported: MMLU Pro 81.9, GPQA Diamond 75.4, SWE-bench Verified 51.6-52.8, PinchBench 86% accuracy (30% faster than Qwen3.6 35B). No independent Arena placement yet as of 17 Aug 2026; hosted via build.nvidia.com and OpenRouter, but paid-tier pricing wasn't confirmed at the time of writing — verify before quoting a rate.

Context Window

tokens

Max Output

33K

tokens

Input Price

Self-host

open weights

Output Price

Self-host

infra cost only

Speed

—

tokens/sec

Released

Aug 2026

2026-08-11

Blended Cost

—

self-host

Value Score

—

n/a self-host

Capabilities

ChatFunction CallingCode GenerationReasoning

Benchmarks

Quality Index

MMLU Pro

81.9

Price vs Quality

Context Window in Context

▸ Nemotron 3.5 Lightning1M
GPT-4.11M
Gemini 2.5 Pro1M
Gemini 2.0 Flash1M
Llama 4 Maverick1M
GPT-5.51M
GPT-5.5 Pro1M
Claude Opus 4.71M

Bar length is logarithmic — each full step is 10× the tokens. Shown against the models with the nearest context windows, not the directory extremes.

Try in Playground Use via Swfte Connect NVIDIA Docs

Compare With

Open Source: Licensed under OpenMDW-1.1

Not on our gateway yet

Nemotron 3.5 Lightning is open-weight, so you can run it yourself. Swfte Connect turns your deployment into a managed endpoint that speaks the same API as every other model in this directory.

The request

curl https://api.swfte.com/agents/v2/gateway/chat/completions \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SWFTE_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "model": "nvidia:nemotron-3.5-lightning-30b-a3b",
    "messages": [{"role": "user", "content": "Hello"}]
  }'

Deploy this model with Swfte Connect

About Nemotron 3.5 Lightning

Nemotron 3.5 Lightning is a open-source AI model by NVIDIA, released on August 11, 2026. It supports a context window of 1000K tokens and can generate up to 33K output tokens.

Nemotron 3.5 Lightning is published as open weights (OpenMDW-1.1) for self-hosting. There is no per-token API price. Cost depends on your inference infrastructure: GPU rental, throughput per GPU, and operating overhead. For commodity 24-48GB GPUs the effective cost typically lands in the $0.10-$0.50 per million output tokens range, well below the cheapest hosted alternatives.

Nemotron 3.5 Lightning is available as an open-source model under the OpenMDW-1.1 license, meaning you can self-host it for predictable costs or use it through API providers like Swfte Connect.

Using Nemotron 3.5 Lightning with Swfte

Access Nemotron 3.5 Lightning through Swfte Connect, our unified LLM gateway. Connect gives you a single API for 50+ models, with automatic routing, cost optimization, and fallback handling. You can also try Nemotron 3.5 Lightning in our AI Playground before integrating.