Overview
- NVIDIA published Nemotron 3.5 Lightning and the NeMo Switchyard router on Tuesday, August 11, 2026, and made the model and code available on Hugging Face, ModelScope, OpenRouter, build.nvidia.com and GitHub.
- Nemotron 3.5 Lightning is a 30 billion parameter mixture-of-experts model that activates about 3 billion parameters per token and uses multi-token and speculative decoding to boost throughput.
- NeMo Switchyard is an open-source, provider-agnostic routing library (written in Rust) that evaluates each agent step and directs work to the cheapest or fastest model that meets quality, latency or cost targets.
- NVIDIA and early partners report large cost and latency gains—vendor benchmarks claim up to 4x faster token generation, about 30% faster agentic task completion, and examples of 30–74% cost reductions—but those figures come from internal and partner tests and need independent validation.
- Journalists report NVIDIA is developing Nemotron 4 with a largest model aimed at 1 trillion-plus parameters, but that project is still in training with no firm release date; enterprises can run Lightning locally and post-train it, yet production use will require per-step checks, escalation rules and independent benchmarks to guard accuracy and safety.