NVIDIA has officially launched the Nemotron 3 family of open models, marking a major advancement in transparent, high-performance AI built for the agentic era. First announced in late 2025, this release includes model weights, extensive training datasets, and full reinforcement learning recipes—empowering developers to build specialized multi-agent systems with unprecedented visibility.
Unlike closed-source alternatives, Nemotron 3 is distributed under the NVIDIA Open Model License. By sharing pre-training pipelines and infrastructure recipes, NVIDIA is positioning itself as the open backbone for industries ranging from software engineering and finance to autonomous robotics.
At a Glance: Why Nemotron 3 Matters
- Hybrid Architecture: Fuses Mamba-2 state-space layers with sparse MoE for constant-time memory.
- Massive Context: 1-million-token window enables deep reasoning across entire codebases.
- Extreme Efficiency: Up to 3.3x higher throughput than comparable models (e.g., Qwen3-30B).
- Enterprise Ready: Native support on Amazon Bedrock and SageMaker JumpStart as of February 2026.
Revolutionary Hybrid Architecture
The core innovation of Nemotron 3 lies in its hybrid Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) design. It interleaves Mamba-2 state-space layers with sparse MoE routing and selective Transformer attention blocks.
Traditional dense Transformers suffer from quadratic KV cache growth, which slows down generation as sequences get longer. Nemotron 3 solves this by replacing most expensive attention operations with Mamba-2 processing. This results in:
- Constant-time memory: Predictable performance even at the context limit.
- High Throughput: 2-4x higher inference speeds compared to standard Transformer models.
- Persistent Memory: A native 1-million-token context window that allows agents to maintain coherence over weeks of interaction or massive document sets.
The Nemotron 3 Family
The lineup is divided into three tiers, optimized for different scales of deployment:
- Nemotron 3 Nano (Available Now): A 31.6B total parameter model that activates only 3.2B parameters per token. Despite its size, it outperforms GPT-OSS-20B and leads open-model benchmarks in coding (SWE-Bench) and scientific reasoning (GPQA Diamond).
- Nemotron 3 Super (~100B parameters): Arriving in the first half of 2026, Super is optimized for multi-agent collaboration, fitting on just two H100 GPUs while delivering the reasoning depth required for enterprise automation.
- Nemotron 3 Ultra (~500B parameters): The flagship reasoning engine (expected Mid-2026). It utilizes LatentMoE—a hardware-aware design that allows the model to access 4x more experts at the same inference cost—positioning it as a powerhouse for complex planning and verification.
Built for Agents: Key Innovations
Nemotron 3 isn’t just a chatbot; it’s a “thinking” engine designed for autonomous workflows:
- NeMo Gym: An open-source RL library that allows agents to learn through verifiable rewards in simulated environments.
- Granular Reasoning Control: Developers can set explicit “thinking” token budgets. The model can generate partial reasoning traces before emitting a final answer, allowing for a perfect balance between speed and accuracy.
- NVFP4 Precision: Super and Ultra are trained using NVIDIA’s 4-bit floating-point format on Blackwell GPUs, drastically reducing memory overhead without sacrificing model quality.
- Native Tool Use: Optimized for RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) and multi-step tool calls, ensuring agents don’t “drift” during complex tasks.
Ecosystem and Accessibility
NVIDIA has made adoption seamless. Model weights are available on Hugging Face in BF16, FP8, and NVFP4 precisions. As of February 2026, Nemotron 3 Nano is already live on Amazon Bedrock and SageMaker JumpStart, with support across Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and CoreWeave rolling out.
For developers, NVIDIA provides “cookbooks” and the NeMo Evaluator to validate safety and performance, making it easier than ever to transition from a prototype to a production-grade agentic system.
The Bottom Line
As AI shifts from “chat” to “action,” the need for efficient, transparent models has never been higher. By combining its hardware dominance with cutting-edge hybrid architectures, NVIDIA’s Nemotron 3 provides the most compelling foundation yet for the next generation of autonomous AI.
