NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Lightning
NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Lightning is an open 30-billion-parameter MoE with 3 billion active parameters per token (August 11, 2026), distilled from Nemotron 3 Ultra and specialized for the execution layer of always-on agents. The hybrid Mamba-2 + MoE + Attention architecture under the OpenMDW-1.1 license offers up to 1 million tokens of context and up to 4× output speed through Multi-Token Prediction and Speculative Decoding.
- Open Weights
- Workstation
- OpenRouter
- Text
- Instruction-Tuned
- Long Context
- Agentic Orchestrator
- Real-Time
Sovereign Risk: LOW NVIDIA is a US company and subject to the CLOUD Act when using the hosted API/NIM infrastructure. However, the weights are released fully open under the permissive OpenMDW-1.1 license (including training data recipes), enabling independent auditing and fully local operation without any cloud dependency, which reduces the risk accordingly.
Key metrics
Score · Latency · Cost · Quality
- Total Score Bronze
- 64.26
- Routine
- 37.03
- Reasoning
- 27.23
- LLM Judge Avg
- 3.33 / 5
- 100 Coverage
- Avg Task Duration
- 19.26s
- Real-Time
- Token Rate
- 109.56tok/s
- Output Rate
- P95 Latency
- 45.91s
- Top 5 %
- Total Tokens
- 210700
- Output Volume
- Cost per 1K
- $0.0002
- USD / 1K Requests
- Benchmark Cost
- $0.04
- Total · 210700 tok
Benchmark modules
10 modules · weighted · vs. model median & top performer
Token efficiency & latency
Consumption per module vs. model median
Token consumption per module
Performance profile
Key metrics – legend
Score
- Total Score
- Overall score derived from Routine and Reasoning scores. Basis for the fleet rank and tier assignment (Gold / Silver / Bronze).
- Routine
- Score for standard tasks: code generation, text transformation, structured outputs. Weighted by task complexity.
- Reasoning
- Score for analytical and logical tasks: multi-step problem solving, mathematical reasoning, structured argumentation.
- Rank
- Position in the fleet comparison, sorted by Total Score. Refers to the snapshot at the time of testing.
LLM Judge
- LLM Judge Ø
- Average quality rating by an independent judge model on a scale of 1–5.
- Coverage
- Share of tasks for which a judge rating is available. 100% means all responses were evaluated.
Latency & speed
- Avg. Task Duration
- Average time per task from the first to the last token of the response, measured across all benchmark tasks.
- Token Rate
- Output speed in tokens per second. Relevant for interactive applications and real-time streaming.
- P95 Latency
- 95th percentile of response times — shows outliers. Lower values mean fewer long wait times in edge cases.
Cost
- Cost per 1K
- API price per 1,000 output tokens in US dollars. Basis for cost calculation in production use.
- Benchmark Cost
- Total cost for the complete benchmark run of this model.