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NVIDIA: Nemotron 3.5 Lightning (nitro)
nvidia/nemotron-3.5-lightning:nitro
Model weightsNVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Lightning is an open mixture-of-experts model from NVIDIA, with 3B active parameters out of 30B total. It is suited for high-throughput agentic workloads and specialized tasks that benefit from domain-specific customization.
Providers
Different companies host the same model. OpenRouter routes your request to one of them based on the routing mode you pick: Balanced (price + speed), Nitro (fastest), or Floor (cheapest).
| Provider | Input /M | Output /M | Cache read /M | Latency | Throughput | Uptime |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| $0.050 | $0.20 | $0.0100 | 0.24s | 457 tok/s | ||
| $0.060 | $0.16 | $0.0300 | 0.26s | 210 tok/s | ||
| $0.025 | $0.12 | $0.0125 | 1.23s | 109 tok/s | ||
| $0.070 | $0.20 | $0.0400 | 0.53s | 94 tok/s |
Input $0.05 / Output $0.20457 tok/s100.00% uptime
Input $0.06 / Output $0.16210 tok/s99.82% uptime
Input $0.025 / Output $0.12109 tok/s99.40% uptime- Input $0.07 / Output $0.2094 tok/s100.00% uptime
Pricing
The average price customers actually pay for this model, next to the prices providers post. Caching and discounts mean the price actually paid is often well below the listed one.
Weighted average
Nemotron 3.5 Lightning — Price history
| $0.0186 | $0.120 | 49.6% | 4.4% | ||
| $0.0250 | $0.200 | 61.9% | 12.6% | ||
| $0.0478 | $0.159 | 40.2% | 11.7% | ||
| $0.0593 | $0.200 | 35.5% | 71.3% |
- Effective in $0.0186 / Effective out $0.120Token share4.4%
- Effective in $0.0250 / Effective out $0.200Token share12.6%
- Effective in $0.0478 / Effective out $0.159Token share11.7%
- Effective in $0.0593 / Effective out $0.200Token share71.3%
Performance
Throughput is how fast the model writes (tokens per second — higher is better). Latency is total round-trip time (lower is better). TTFT is time-to-first-token — how long before you see anything appear (lower is better).
P50, best across providers
P50, best provider
Uptime
Uptime is the percentage of the past 3 days that at least one provider was responding to requests. Availability is the percentage of time that inference was successfully served. OpenRouter continuously monitors and uses the next-best provider when one returns an error.
Availability over the last 3 days
Last 72 hoursAvailability over the last 24 hours
When an error occurs in an upstream provider, we can recover by routing to another healthy provider, if your request filters allow it. You can access per-provider uptime data programmatically through the Endpoints API. Learn more about our load balancing and provider routing options.
Benchmarks
Scores on standardized evaluations and this model’s own outputs on shared benchmark prompts. Higher percentages are better — and each rank shows where this model lands among the models evaluated on that source.
| Source | Benchmark | Score |
|---|---|---|
| Artificial Analysis | Nemotron 3.5 Lightning Intelligence Index | 5.5 |
| Artificial Analysis | Nemotron 3.5 Lightning Coding Index | 26.8 |
| Artificial Analysis | Nemotron 3.5 Lightning Agentic Index | 3.5 |
| Artificial Analysis | Nemotron 3.5 Lightning GPQA Diamond | 74.3% |
| Artificial Analysis | Nemotron 3.5 Lightning HLE | 10.6% |
| Artificial Analysis | Nemotron 3.5 Lightning AA-LCR | 60.3% |
| Artificial Analysis | Nemotron 3.5 Lightning τ-Bench Banking | 8.9% |
| Artificial Analysis | Nemotron 3.5 Lightning GDPval-AA | 7.3% |
| Artificial Analysis | Nemotron 3.5 Lightning CritPt | 0.0% |
| Artificial Analysis | Nemotron 3.5 Lightning SciCode | 32.1% |
| Artificial Analysis | Nemotron 3.5 Lightning Terminal-Bench 4.0 | 0.5% |
| Artificial Analysis | Nemotron 3.5 Lightning Terminal-Bench 2.1 | 24.3% |
| Artificial Analysis | Nemotron 3.5 Lightning AA-Omniscience Accuracy | 14.7% |
| Artificial Analysis | Nemotron 3.5 Lightning AA-Omniscience Non-Hallucination Rate | 64.3% |
Apps
Public apps that send the most traffic to this model. Good signal for what real production workloads look like — and a hint at which use cases this model is best suited for.
Activity
Token volume and request traffic to this model over time.
API
Drop-in code to call this model. OpenRouter's API is OpenAI-compatible — most SDKs work by just swapping the base URL. The only thing that changes between models is the model slug below.
Not currently available through EU in-region routing. In-region routing docs
Documentation
Guides, cookbooks, blog posts, and tools for building with NVIDIA: Nemotron 3.5 Lightning (nitro) on OpenRouter.
Frequently asked questions
NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Lightning is an open mixture-of-experts model from NVIDIA, with 3B active parameters out of 30B total. It is suited for high-throughput agentic workloads and specialized tasks that benefit from domain-specific customization.
The Nemotron 3.5 Lightning documentation on OpenRouter includes the What Is Nemotron 3.5 Lightning blog post. The quickstart covers API keys and your first request, and the API reference lists every parameter.
Nemotron 3.5 Lightning costs $0.025/M input tokens and $0.12/M output tokens, with separate rates for Cache Read at $0.0125/M tokens.
Nemotron 3.5 Lightning has a 262,144 token context window. It supports up to 65,536 completion tokens.
Yes. Nemotron 3.5 Lightning accepts tools and tool_choice for function calling. It also supports structured outputs via a JSON schema in response_format.
Nemotron 3.5 Lightning is served by 4 providers on OpenRouter: Darkbloom, Fireworks, DeepInfra, and CoreWeave. Requests are routed to the best available provider, with automatic failover to the others, and you can pin or exclude providers with provider routing.
Nemotron 3.5 Lightning was released on August 11, 2026.