NVIDIA AI Releases Nemotron 3.5 Lightning: A 30B Open MoE with 3B Active Parameters, and NeMo Switchyard Model Router
NVIDIA introduced open technologies for building always-on AI agents from systems of specialized models. Two artifacts shipped together. Nemotron 3.5 Lightning is a lightweight, customizable open model built for high-volume agentic tasks, and NeMo Switchyard is an open source routing library that directs each step of an agent workflow to the most capable and efficient model available. The problem both address is structural: long-running agents spend most of their time on tool calls, result validation, and subagent delegation, and sending every one of those steps to a frontier reasoning model adds cost and latency. Lightning is a 30B mixture-of-experts model with 3B active parameters, built on a hybrid Mamba-2 + MoE + Attention architecture with a 1M-token context window. NVIDIA reports up...
NVIDIA introduced open technologies for building always-on AI agents from systems of specialized models. Two artifacts shipped together. Nemotron 3.5 Lightning is a lightweight, customizable open model built for high-volume agentic tasks, and NeMo Switchyard is an open source routing library that directs each step of an agent workflow to the most capable and efficient model available. The problem both address is structural: long-running agents spend most of their time on tool calls, result validation, and subagent delegation, and sending every one of those steps to a frontier reasoning model adds cost and latency. Lightning is a 30B mixture-of-experts model with 3B active parameters, built on a hybrid Mamba-2 + MoE + Attention architecture with a 1M-token context window. NVIDIA reports up to 4x faster output speed than similar-sized models, and 30% faster completion of 10,000 PinchBench tasks than Qwen3.6 35B at comparable accuracy. Many industry players like CrowdStrike, Harvey, CodeRabbit, Fastino Labs, and Lila Sciences are already customizing it for cybersecurity, legal, coding, finance, and healthcare workloads. Is it deployable? Yes. Nemotron 3.5 Lightning is generally available under the permissive OpenMDW-1.1 license, with open weights, training data, and recipes. NVIDIA states the model is ready for commercial use. Which companies: Anyone with a single modern GPU. NVIDIA lists single-GPU deployment on 1x DGX Spark (GB10) or 1x H100. That puts solo developers and seed-stage startups on the same footing as enterprises. Mid-market teams can serve it from Baseten, Together AI, or Nebius; regulated enterprises can keep it fully on-premises. Industries: Cybersecurity, legal services, software engineering, financial services, healthcare, and life sciences all appear in NVIDIAs named customer set. Applications: Tool calling, result validation, subagent delegation, code review routing, log triage, contract parsing, and long-context retrieval across a 1M-token window