# Nemotron 3.5 Lightning (30B-A3B)

> NVIDIA's 30B hybrid model keeps 3B parameters active and extends the Nemotron 3 Nano backbone with a 1M-token context window and multi-token prediction.

| Property | Value |
| --- | --- |
| Lab | NVIDIA (United States) |
| Released | 2026-08-11 |
| Decoder type | Hybrid MoE |
| Family | Hybrid MoE |
| Scale | 30B total, 3B active (10% active) |
| Context window | 1,048,576 tokens |
| Attention | Mostly Mamba-2 with six GQA layers |
| Layer mix | 6 GQA + 23 Mamba-2 + 23 MoE; GQA + MoE MTP predictor |
| KV cache / token (bf16) | 6 KiB (Very low) |
| License | OpenMDW 1.1 |

**Key detail:** Adds a shared GQA-plus-MoE MTP predictor to the 52-layer Nemotron 3 Nano backbone.

## Architecture concepts

- [Grouped-Query Attention (GQA)](https://llm-atlas-7or.pages.dev/concepts/gqa.md): Several query heads share one key/value head, shrinking the KV cache with little quality loss.
- [Mixture of Experts (MoE)](https://llm-atlas-7or.pages.dev/concepts/moe.md): Many feed-forward experts, but a router sends each token to only a few of them.
- [Hybrid Attention (Hybrid attention)](https://llm-atlas-7or.pages.dev/concepts/hybrid-attention.md): Mixes cheap linear-attention or state-space layers with a few full-attention layers.
- [Multi-Token Prediction (MTP)](https://llm-atlas-7or.pages.dev/concepts/mtp.md): Extra heads learn to predict several future tokens, and can draft tokens at inference.

## Benchmark (Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index)

- AA Intelligence Index v5.0: total 5.5 (Knowledge Work 1, Coding 0.2, Science 0.6, General 20.6)
- AA Intelligence Index v4.3.2: total 12.9 (General 26.3, Scientific 5.3, Coding 16.3, Agents 2.6)

## Links

- Architecture diagram: https://sebastianraschka.com/llm-architecture-gallery/images/architectures/nemotron-3-5-lightning-30b-a3b.webp
- config.json: https://huggingface.co/nvidia/NVIDIA-Nemotron-3.5-Lightning-30B-A3B-NVFP4/blob/main/config.json
- License: https://openmdw.ai/license/1-1/
- Tech report: https://research.nvidia.com/labs/nemotron/files/NVIDIA-Nemotron-3.5-Super-and-Lightning-Technical-Report.pdf
- Source card (source of truth): https://sebastianraschka.com/llm-architecture-gallery/#card-nemotron-3-5-lightning-30b-a3b
- Web page: https://llm-atlas-7or.pages.dev/models/nemotron-3-5-lightning-30b-a3b/
- JSON: https://llm-atlas-7or.pages.dev/api/models/nemotron-3-5-lightning-30b-a3b.json

_Data from Sebastian Raschka's LLM Architecture Gallery (https://sebastianraschka.com/llm-architecture-gallery/). Synced 2026-11-04._