Model release

NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B-A3B

NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B-A3B is an open-weight model release in the NVIDIA Nemotron family from NVIDIA1, version 3.5 Lightning (30B-A3B), GA, released Aug 11, 2026. Its weights can be downloaded by the public1 6 3 under the OpenMDW License Agreement, version 1.11 2.

Nemotron 3.5 Lightning is an NVIDIA language model with 30B total and 3B active parameters, using a hybrid Mamba-2 and attention mixture-of-experts architecture with multi-token prediction and configurable reasoning. NVIDIA released full-precision BF16 weights, an NVFP4 checkpoint for deployment, draft models for speculative decoding, and a separate base checkpoint.1 6

Model hub: Model card (BF16) (external site: huggingface.co)
License: OpenMDW License Agreement, version 1.1 (external site: raw.githubusercontent.com)
Documentation: Nemotron 3.5 Lightning training recipe (external site: github.com)

On AI on Hugging Face: nvidia/NVIDIA-Nemotron-3.5-Lightning-30B-A3B-BF16

Last reviewedSep 29, 2026Entry updated Oct 2, 2026Documented release Aug 11, 2026

Availability and license

Overall availability

Public

Weights are downloadable from Hugging Face under the OpenMDW-1.1 license, a copy of which is included in the model repository; the repository metadata showed no access gate when checked.1 2 3

Availability fact review: not separately recorded

Availability is separate from permission: read the license before using or redistributing.

OpenMDW License Agreement, version 1.1 (external site: huggingface.co)1 2
Applies to: Weights · custom license (no SPDX identifier) · fact-level rights review not recorded
Plain-language guide to the OpenMDW License Agreement, version 1.1
Apache License 2.0 (Nemotron Developer Repository training recipes) (external site: raw.githubusercontent.com)5
Applies to: Code · SPDX Apache-2.0 · on the rubric’s OSI-approved software-license list · fact-level rights review not recorded
Plain-language guide to the Apache License 2.0

OpenMDW-1.1 grants free permission to use, modify, and share the model materials without restriction, including under copyright, patent, database, and trade secret rights. Redistributors must include a copy of the agreement and keep applicable origin notices. All rights end for anyone who sues claiming the materials infringe a patent or copyright, unless responding to a suit brought against them first. It imposes no conditions on outputs and disclaims warranties. The SPDX list (version 3.29.0) includes OpenMDW-1.0 but not version 1.1, so no SPDX ID is recorded. NVIDIA's Lightning recipe page states that the weights, data, and recipes are released under OpenMDW-1.1, while the Nemotron Developer Repository's only LICENSE file is Apache 2.0; this record lists the repository LICENSE for the recipe code.2 4 6 5

Component reuse rights

A readable or downloadable component is not automatically reusable. These indicators concern recorded license evidence, not system certification.

weights: Unknown — no complete fact-level rights review
code: Unknown — no complete fact-level rights review
data: Unknown — no complete fact-level rights review
documentation: Unknown — no complete fact-level rights review

No complete system-rights review is recorded for this release.

Model-disclosure tier

Computed from the checklist below using USASI rubric v0.2. An editorial category, not a certification.

Open-weight

The model parameters for this release can be downloaded by the public. License terms may still restrict use, redistribution, or commercial use.

The weights are under a license that is not on the rubric's OSI-approved list. Read its terms before use.

How tiers are computed

Public materials checklist

Items for a model under USASI rubric v0.2. Unknown means unassessed or insufficient evidence.

Public materials checklist for NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B-A3B
Item	Status	Notes and evidence
WeightsCan the general public download the model parameters for this release?	Public	BF16, NVFP4, and base BF16 checkpoints are published on Hugging Face.1 6 3
Inference codeIs code for running the model published?	Public	The model card gives deployment instructions for vLLM and SGLang.1
Training codeIs the code used to train the model published?	Public	The Apache-2.0 Nemotron Developer Repository provides pretraining, SFT, RL, evaluation, and quantization stages for this model.6 5
Training-data informationDoes the information cover provenance, scope, acquisition, selection, labeling, processing, and where data or alternatives can be obtained? Access alone does not establish completeness.	Unknown	Not assessed.
Training-data accessCan the training data be obtained? This is independent of information completeness and reuse rights; original unshareable data need not be downloadable.	Partial	The model card says NVIDIA releases its final pre-training and post-training data, with an ungated sample set and gating and approval required for the remaining code, math, and multilingual data. It also lists third-party and NVIDIA datasets used in training as private and not publicly accessible.1
Complete training pipelineIs the complete base-training and preprocessing pipeline published, including configuration? Fine-tuning code or an inference SDK alone is insufficient.	Unknown	Not assessed.
Legacy data assessment (v0.1)Historical assessment combining download access and disclosure. Preserved for traceability; excluded from the v0.2 tier calculation. See the new separate assessments above.	Partial	The model card lists the pre- and post-training datasets. Major portions are released in Hugging Face collections, some requiring access approval, while several third-party and NVIDIA datasets are listed as private and not publicly accessible.1 7
Training recipeAre the training configuration and procedure documented in enough detail to follow?	Public	The recipe documents pretraining, SFT, RL, evaluation, and quantization stages. There is no separate technical report; NVIDIA names the model cards and recipe configs as the references, and notes the recipes use only the open-sourced data subset.6
Evaluation materialsPublic = evaluation code or prompts that let others re-run the evaluations are published. Partial = results only.	Public	The model card publishes benchmark results and states that evaluation recipes and commands for reproducing them are published in NeMo Gym.1

What it is useful for

NVIDIA presents Lightning as a model for fast, specialized task execution in long-running agents; the BF16 card describes these weights mainly as a starting point for customization such as fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, distillation, and building quantized variants.1 6

Run and use notes

Documented facts only. No hardware or performance claims are made without a cited source and stated assumptions.

The model card documents serving the BF16 checkpoint with vLLM or SGLang on NVIDIA GB200, B200, and H100 GPUs, including a single H100 80GB deployment in BF16 precision at a 256K-token context, and recommends the NVFP4 checkpoint for optimized inference.1

Organization context

NVIDIA

Provenance and derivatives

Trained by NVIDIA through pretraining, continued pretraining for multi-token prediction, supervised fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning; the base checkpoint is published separately. The model card says post-training synthetic data was generated with teacher models, including third-party open models such as GPT-OSS-120B.1 6

Derived from: NVIDIA-Nemotron-3.5-Lightning-30B-A3B-Base-BF16 (external site: huggingface.co) — NVIDIA's base checkpoint, listed alongside this release in the training recipe.

Other releases in the NVIDIA Nemotron family

NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Super 120B-A12BModel-disclosure tier (USASI rubric v0.2): Open-weight
NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra 550B-A55BModel-disclosure tier (USASI rubric v0.2): Open-weight
NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Super VL 120B-A12BModel-disclosure tier (USASI rubric v0.2): Open-weight
NVIDIA Nemotron Labs Dory1.0-4BModel-disclosure tier (USASI rubric v0.2): Open-weight

NVIDIA Nemotron family overview

What this catalog does not know

Unknown means the sources reviewed for this record do not document it. It is not evidence that something does not exist.

Training-data information: unknown.
Complete training pipeline: unknown.

Have a primary source? How to report a correction.

U.S. eligibility

Project eligibility rests on documented governing or maintaining entities, not on contributors.

Eligible · basis: U.S. headquarters

The model card names NVIDIA Corporation as the model developer. NVIDIA's principal executive offices are in Santa Clara, California, per its Form 10-Q for the quarter ended July 26, 2026.1 8

Assessed Sep 29, 2026

Sources

1.
NVIDIA-Nemotron-3.5-Lightning-30B-A3B-BF16 model card (external site: huggingface.co)
NVIDIA (Hugging Face) · Model card · published Aug 11, 2026 · accessed Oct 2, 2026
2.
LICENSE file in the NVIDIA-Nemotron-3.5-Lightning-30B-A3B-BF16 repository (external site: huggingface.co)
NVIDIA (Hugging Face) · License · accessed Sep 29, 2026
3.
Hugging Face model metadata for nvidia/NVIDIA-Nemotron-3.5-Lightning-30B-A3B-BF16 (external site: huggingface.co)
Hugging Face · Other · accessed Sep 29, 2026
4.
SPDX License List data (licenses.json, version 3.29.0) (external site: raw.githubusercontent.com)
SPDX · Other · published Sep 16, 2026 · accessed Sep 29, 2026
5.
NVIDIA Nemotron Developer Repository LICENSE (Apache License 2.0) (external site: raw.githubusercontent.com)
NVIDIA (GitHub) · License · accessed Sep 29, 2026
6.
Nemotron 3.5 Lightning Training Recipe (external site: raw.githubusercontent.com)
NVIDIA (GitHub) · Documentation · accessed Sep 29, 2026
7.
Nemotron-Pre-Training-Datasets collection (external site: huggingface.co)
NVIDIA (Hugging Face) · Dataset card · accessed Sep 29, 2026
8.
NVIDIA Corporation Form 10-Q for the quarter ended July 26, 2026 (external site: sec.gov)
U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (EDGAR) · Filing · published Aug 26, 2026 · accessed Sep 29, 2026

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This listing is not an endorsement, a safety assessment, or a federal approval.

Cite this page

APA style

USASI. (2026, October 2). NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B-A3B. United States of America Superintelligence. https://unitedstatesofamericasuperintelligence.com/open/nemotron-3-5-lightning-30b-a3b/

BibTeX

@misc{usasi_nemotron_3_5_lightning_30b_a3b,
  author = {{USASI}},
  title = {NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B-A3B},
  year = {2026},
  month = oct,
  howpublished = {\url{https://unitedstatesofamericasuperintelligence.com/open/nemotron-3-5-lightning-30b-a3b/}},
  note = {United States of America Superintelligence. Last updated 2026-10-02}
}

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