NVIDIA Launches Nemotron 3.5: Super 120B and Lightning 30B Dual Models
The NVIDIA Nemotron team has released two new models in the Nemotron 3.5 family: Super and Lightning. Super has 120B total parameters with roughly 12B activated, while Lightning comes in at 30B/3B. Aleksa Gordić, a well-known developer from the GPT/open-source community, took part in the announcement and revealed that he joined the Nemotron pretraining team several months ago and is working on even larger models that are "very big, very strong." The release matches the timeline of earlier leaks, making future model updates worth watching closely.
Confirmed
- Nemotron 3.5 Super released with 120B total parameters and about 12B activated (m4, m5)
- Lightning series launched alongside it at 30B/3B scale (m4, m5)
- Aleksa Gordić joined the NVIDIA Nemotron pretraining team months ago and is helping build larger models (m4, m5)
- Super features VL (vision-language) capabilities (m5)
Timeline
- 10-15: testingcatalog leaked that NVIDIA would release Nemotron 3.5 Super VL the following week (possibly at the GTC event on Wednesday the 21st); the model had previously been spotted in official documentation before being pulled, and a link was later posted again as a teaser (m1, m2)
- 10-15: A forwarded post said Super is compact enough to fit on a single DGX Spark, with multiple models launching the same day alongside benchmark charts such as SWE-bench Multilingual (m3)
- 10-16: Gordić confirmed the release of Nemotron 3.5 Super and Lightning (m4, m5)
Why it matters
- The sparse design of 120B total parameters with only 12B activated means a high-performance model can run on a single DGX Spark-class device, dramatically lowering the deployment barrier
- Gordić's hints at "bigger and stronger" models suggest NVIDIA's continued investment in open-source/open-weight models, poised to shake up the open model landscape
2026-10-15 ~ 2026-10-16 · 5 related posts
- Episode 1: NVIDIA Launches Nemotron 3.5: Super 120B and Lightning 30B Dual Models(2026-10-15, 5 posts)
- Episode 2: NVIDIA Open-Sources Nemotron 3.5 Family: 120B Multimodal Super VL and 24GB Bolt(2026-10-15, 31 posts)
- Episode 3: NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Super VL tops US open-weight models(2026-10-15, 2 posts)
Primary sources
- [source] NVIDIA set to launch Nemotron 3.5 Super VL: 120B params, 12B active, image and video input — testingcatalog · 2026-10-15
- Nemotron 3.5 Super teased: 120B model with 12B active fits on one DGX Spark, 2.34x Qwen throughput — kuchaev · 2026-10-15
- NVIDIA Nemotron team ships 3.5 Super (120B/12B VLM) and Lightning (30B/3B) models — arankomatsuzaki · 2026-10-15
- [source] Ex-GPT dev joins NVIDIA Nemotron pretraining, ships Nemotron 3.5 Super and Lightning — suzatweet · 2026-10-16
1 near-duplicate retellings: testingcatalog