Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B-A3B — VRAM, speed & local setup
Written by Jakub Rusinowski · Last updated
30B total, 3B active, pre-trained on over 20T tokens and released with speculative-decoding companions. Hybrid Mamba-2 + MoE + attention, so its cache does not grow the way a pure transformer's would. BF16 and NVFP4 builds are published.
Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B-A3B needs about 19 GB of VRAM at Q4_K_M — quantized weights plus framework overhead, before any KV cache. On Apple Silicon that figure comes out of unified memory.
VRAM and speed by quantization
Quoted against NVIDIA RTX 4090 (24 GB). Weights plus overhead only: this model's architecture is unpublished, so no KV cache is added.
| Quant | Memory | VRAM | Speed (est.) | Fit |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Q2_K 2.63 bpw | 10.7 GB | ~212 tok/s | Fits | |
| Q3_K_M 3.41 bpw | 13.6 GB | ~196 tok/s | Fits | |
| Q4_K_M 4.83 bpw | 18.9 GB | ~172 tok/s | Fits | |
| Q5_K_M 5.67 bpw | 22.1 GB | ~160 tok/s | Tight | |
| Q6_K 6.56 bpw | 25.4 GB | ~22 tok/s | Offload | |
| Q8_0 8.50 bpw | 32.7 GB | ~20 tok/s | Offload | |
| F16 16.00 bpw | 60.8 GB | — | Too big |
Black marker = usable memory on the NVIDIA RTX 4090 (24 GB). Estimates from the memory-bandwidth roofline on the methodology page. Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B-A3B VRAM calculator →
Get Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B-A3B running
The cheapest catalogued GPU that runs Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B-A3B is the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX (24 GB).
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How to run Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B-A3B
Install Ollama, then run:
ollama run nemotron-3.5-lightning:30bSpecifications
Corroborated — Two or more independent sources agree on these figures, but the model card itself was not retrieved. Treat the numbers as good rather than confirmed. Still unconfirmed: arch.kv_layers.
- Parameters
- 30 Billion (3B active)
- Context window
- 1,000,000
- Architecture
- Hybrid Mamba-2 + MoE
- Provider
- NVIDIA
- Licence
- OpenMDW-1.1
- Practical deployment
- Single consumer GPU
- Specified at
- Q4_K_M
- System RAM
- 32 GB
- Record updated
- 2026-09-19
Commercial use permitted. No usage restrictions beyond attribution.
Quality and use cases
Scores as published by the model’s authors or an independent evaluator — quality, not throughput, and not measured by us.
Can I run Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B-A3B on my GPU?
Other Nemotron 3.5 sizes
Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B-A3B — frequently asked questions
How much VRAM does Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B-A3B need?
About 19 GB at Q4_K_M — quantized weights plus framework overhead, before any KV cache. The cache grows with context length and is added on top; the table above folds it in. Apple Silicon counts unified memory toward the same figure.
Does Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B-A3B run on an RTX 4090 (24 GB)?
Yes. Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B-A3B needs about 19 GB at Q4_K_M, inside a 24 GB card, at an estimated 172 tokens/sec.
How do I run Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B-A3B locally?
Install Ollama and run `ollama run nemotron-3.5-lightning:30b`. That pulls the weights and starts a local OpenAI-compatible endpoint; after the download nothing leaves the machine.
What other sizes does Nemotron 3.5 come in?
Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B-A3B (19 GB), Nemotron 3.5 Bolt 74B (23 GB), Nemotron 3.5 Super VL 120B-A12B (73 GB). Every size shares the family's training and licence; the larger ones score higher and need proportionally more memory.