# Nemotron 3.5 Lightning

Nemotron 3.5 Lightning is an AI model released by NVIDIA on Aug 11 2026. It has 30B parameters, a 1M context window and open source. At release it scored 75.4% on GPQA Diamond and 51.6% on SWE-Bench Verified.

## Facts

| Field | Value |
| --- | --- |
| Model | Nemotron 3.5 Lightning |
| Developer | NVIDIA |
| Release date | Tuesday, Aug 11 2026 |
| Licensing | Open Source |
| Parameters | 30B |
| Context window | 1M |

## Benchmark scores published at release

| Benchmark | Score | Source | What it measures |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| SWE-Bench Verified | 51.6% | Lab | Real coding tasks pulled from open-source projects — the AI has to find and fix actual bugs. A human-checked version of the original SWE-Bench. Higher is better. |
| GPQA Diamond | 75.4% | Lab | Graduate-level science questions in biology, physics, and chemistry — hard enough that subject-matter PhDs score around 65%. Higher is better. |

## About Nemotron 3.5 Lightning

Nemotron 3.5 Lightning, released August 11, 2026, was a mid-generation refresh of the small tier rather than a new family: 31.6 billion total parameters with 3.6 billion active, tuned specifically for long-running agentic work. NVIDIA shipped it alongside NeMo Switchyard, an open-source router for agent systems that mix models of different sizes — a pairing that made the positioning explicit, with Lightning as the fast default a router falls back from only when a task needs a larger model.

At launch it reported 75.4% on GPQA Diamond and 51.6% on SWE-Bench Verified — close to gpt-oss-120b-class accuracy at roughly a quarter of the total parameters — with NVIDIA claiming up to four times the output speed of comparably sized models. The release went out under the permissive OpenMDW-1.1 license with weights, training data and recipes included, the fullest openness of any Nemotron release to that point.

## Questions and answers

### When was Nemotron 3.5 Lightning released?

Nemotron 3.5 Lightning was released by NVIDIA on Tuesday, Aug 11 2026.

### Who made Nemotron 3.5 Lightning?

Nemotron 3.5 Lightning was built by NVIDIA. The dominant AI chipmaker, publishing the open Nemotron model family. Ships weights, datasets and training recipes to seed demand for its hardware rather than to sell a chatbot.

### What benchmark scores did Nemotron 3.5 Lightning get?

Nemotron 3.5 Lightning reports 2 tracked benchmark scores — SWE-Bench Verified: 51.6%; GPQA Diamond: 75.4%. Scores are the figures published at release by NVIDIA.

### What is the context window of Nemotron 3.5 Lightning?

Nemotron 3.5 Lightning has a context window of 1M. That is the maximum amount of input plus output the model can hold in a single request.

### How many parameters does Nemotron 3.5 Lightning have?

Nemotron 3.5 Lightning is reported at 30B parameters.

### Is Nemotron 3.5 Lightning open source?

Yes. Nemotron 3.5 Lightning is open source: the model weights are published together with training code and data under an open license, so it can be downloaded, self-hosted, fine-tuned, and in principle reproduced from scratch.

### What came before and after Nemotron 3.5 Lightning?

NVIDIA's previous tracked release was Nemotron 3 Ultra on Jun 4 2026, 68 days earlier. It is the most recent NVIDIA model tracked on AI Release Tracker.


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Canonical page: https://aireleasetracker.com/model/nvidia/nemotron-3.5-lightning
Full dataset: https://aireleasetracker.com/llms-full.txt · JSON: https://aireleasetracker.com/models.json
Source: AI Release Tracker (https://aireleasetracker.com). Benchmark scores are the figures published by the releasing lab at launch.