Everything about Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B A3B

Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B A3B at a glance

Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B A3B is a language model from NVIDIA, released on August 11, 2026. That makes it 2 months old as of October 22, 2026. Its weights are published: you can download it and run it on your own servers, or use one of the 15 API providers that list it on models.dev. It has a reasoning mode: it can "think" before answering, which helps with multi-step problems but uses more tokens, and therefore more money.

We file it under open-weight models (68 models in this category on the site).

What it costs

Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B A3B costs $0.05 per million input tokens and $0.20 per million output tokens (median of 15 providers, checked on October 22, 2026).

To put it in perspective: reading 20,000 tokens (about thirty pages) and writing 2,000 costs roughly $0.001; a thousand of those tasks, $1.4.

That is 5 times cheaper than the median output price of open-weight models ($1).

To estimate your own budget, use the agent cost calculator.

Benchmark results

As of October 22, 2026, Epoch AI publishes no score for Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B A3B on our basket's benchmarks. To place it, rely on its specifications and price, then test it on your own cases.

Technical specifications

Its context window reaches 262,144 tokens, roughly 393 pages of text at 500 words per page: enough for a long report or several contracts at once. A single answer can run to 262,144 tokens.

It accepts as input: text. Its knowledge stops at September 2025: beyond that, it needs web search or your documents.

It can call tools (functions, APIs) and return structured JSON output, which makes it a possible foundation for an AI agent.

The weights are published on Hugging Face (nvidia/NVIDIA-Nemotron-3.5-Lightning-30B-A3B-BF16): 31.6 billion parameters, other license and 717,180 downloads over the last 30 days. See also our list of open-source models.

Who is it for?

Given its category, Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B A3B is mainly aimed at projects where you want control over your data or hosting, or want to adapt the model to your field.

Its very low cost (under half a cent for our sample task) means it can be called thousands of times a day.

Before adopting it, test it on your own examples: benchmarks measure standard tasks, not your job.

Comparable models

In the same category, the models closest to Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B A3B are:

• Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B (NVIDIA, $0.20 per million output tokens)
• Ling 3.0 Flash Fin (inclusionAI (Ant Group), $0.22 per million output tokens)
• Ling 3.0 Flash VL (inclusionAI (Ant Group), $0.18 per million output tokens)
• Laguna S 2.1 (Poolside, $0.18 per million output tokens)