Originally published on AI Tech Connect.
What NVIDIA actually shipped On 11 August 2026, NVIDIA released Nemotron 3.5 Lightning: a mixture-of-experts model with 30 billion total parameters and roughly three billion activated per token, a one-million-token context window, and a hybrid architecture interleaving Mamba-2 state-space layers with MoE layers and a smaller number of conventional attention layers. It is distilled from Nemotron 3 Ultra, the 550-billion-parameter open-weight flagship we covered in July, and aimed at high-volume agentic work rather than the top of a leaderboard. The headline facts, before the marketing settles on top of them: Licence: OpenMDW-1.1, permissive, free for commercial use. You download the weights from Hugging Face or NVIDIA's build platform without requesting permission and without paying a…
