NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Lightning: what the license allows, and what the maker charges
thecontinuitylayer.com/open-models/nemotron-3-5-lightningNVIDIA's 30B-total, 3B-active hybrid Mamba-2, mixture-of-experts and attention model for agents and local inference, released 11 August 2026 in BF16, NVFP4 and GGUF under the OpenMDW-1.1 license.
- 1Partly
Is NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Lightning under an open license?
Partly, by NVIDIA's own page.
The card says use of the model is governed by the OpenMDW-1.1 license and that it is ready for commercial use. The license text grants permission to deal in the model materials without restriction, free of charge, provided the agreement and its notices stay with any distribution; it is a permissive license, but not an OSI-approved one on the pages read.
Yes means: The weights are under an OSI-approved license such as Apache-2.0 or MIT. Partly means the maker's own license with conditions, such as a user cap or an acceptable-use clause; no means research or non-commercial use only.
- 2Yes
Can you download NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Lightning's weights?
Yes, by NVIDIA's own page.
BF16 reference weights, an NVFP4 release and a GGUF checkpoint are on Hugging Face under nvidia.
Yes means: The maker's page links the weights for download with nothing more than a click-through license. Partly means an access form, an approval step, or only some sizes released.
- 3Yes
Does the maker state NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Lightning's context window?
Yes, by NVIDIA's own page.
The card states "Up to 1M tokens (for single H100 deployment, we use 256K)."
Yes means: A token count for the context window is on the maker's page or model card.
- 4Yes
Does the maker say what it takes to run NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Lightning on your own machine?
Yes, by NVIDIA's own page.
30B total and 3B active parameters; the NVFP4 card lists a single H100 and A100-class GPUs, a Local AI section for RTX 5090, DGX Spark and RTX 6000 Pro, and Ollama defaults of 4K context under 24GB of VRAM, 32K at 24 to 48GB and 256K above 48GB.
Yes means: The page states the parameter count and the memory or hardware it needs. Partly means the parameter count alone.
- 5Partly
Does the maker publish a price for its hosted NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Lightning?
Partly, by NVIDIA's own page.
The card links a chat demo on build.nvidia.com and states no per-token price; the build.nvidia.com page could not be opened on the day checked.
Yes means: A per-token price on the maker's own pricing page. Partly means a hosted version exists but the price sits behind sign-in or a sales call.
- 6Not stated
Does the maker train on your prompts when you use its hosted NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Lightning?
NVIDIA's pages do not say.
No NVIDIA page read on the day checked says whether prompts sent to the build.nvidia.com endpoint train NVIDIA models.
Yes means: Here no is the good answer: the maker's page says what you send its API is not used for training. Yes means it is unless you opt out; partly means it depends on the plan or the page does not give the default.
- 7Yes
Can you fine-tune NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Lightning and keep the result?
Yes, by NVIDIA's own page.
The OpenMDW-1.1 text grants permission to deal in the model materials without restriction, with no condition on derivatives beyond keeping the agreement and notices in any distribution; the card lists post-training, domain adaptation and quantized or GGUF variants as intended uses.
Yes means: The license allows fine-tuning and the fine-tuned weights are yours to keep and share. Partly means conditions follow the derivative, or a hosted fine-tune you cannot download.
License as stated: OpenMDW-1.1, the OpenMDW License Agreement version 1.1; the card says ready for commercial use; a permissive model license not on the OSI's approved list on the pages read.. Every grade above is read from NVIDIA's own page on the day shown. If a page has changed, tell us.