NVIDIA Releases Open-Source Nemotron 3.5 Lightning as CEO Jensen Huang Pushes Open-Weight AI

The world’s largest company by market cap, NVIDIA, has announced the release of the Nemotron 3.5 Lightning, an open-source AI model designed for agentic workflows. This comes as the company’s CEO, Jensen Huang, shows support for open-weight AI models, which he noted are key to America’s AI leadership.

Nvidia Releases Open-Source Nemotron 3.5 Lightning AI Model

In a blog post, the company announced the launch of Nemotron 3.5 Lightning, the latest model in the Nemotron 3 model family, designed for long-running agentic AI workloads. “Built for specialized tasks within larger multi-agent systems, Nemotron 3.5 Lightning, a 30-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts model, helps create smarter and more efficient agentic applications,” the post read.

Introducing NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Lightning⚡

An open 30B MoE model with 3B active parameters, built for always-on agents to complete high-volume, specialized tasks faster.

It delivers up to 4x the output speed of similar-sized models. pic.twitter.com/ENWrZe76pU

— NVIDIA AI (@NVIDIAAI) August 11, 2026

NVIDIA further noted that the AI model is a fully customizable open model that delivers up to 4x faster output speed, leading to 30% faster agentic task completion compared with other models in its class. Users will be able to post-train the model with the company’s NeMo on an organization’s own domain data, tools, and workflows to improve accuracy for specialized tasks.

The company named CrowdStrike, Harvey, and CodeRabbit as among companies that have already tested and customized the model. The model is available on HuggingFace and includes “weights, data and recipes.”

The Nemotron 3.5 Lightning release follows CEO Jensen Huang’s public show of support for open-weight models, describing them as necessary for America’s AI leadership.

Meanwhile, the AI model release also follows Meta’s release of its open-weight Muse Glimmer AI Model yesterday. Meta and NVIDIA were among tech firms that wrote an open letter last month warning against U.S. restrictions on foreign open-weight AI models.

Release Of The NeMo Switchyard

NVIDIA also announced the release of the NeMo Switchyard, which it described as an open-source library for smart routing inside popular agent tools. The company further noted that enterprises can use it to build a router based on their specific needs.

“When deployed, NeMo Switchyard can intelligently direct each request to the most capable and suitable model for the job without requiring developers to rewrite their applications,” NVIDIA said.

The NVIDIA stock is up over 1% today, trading at around $220, according to TradingView data. The stock is also up over 15% year-to-date (YTD) as the S&P 500 continues to reach new highs, approaching the $8,000 psychological level.

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