Model reference · open weights

NVIDIA-Nemotron-3.5-Bolt

LLMs nvidia Text gen · MoE 3 builds Its own licence terms 1k dl/mo

NVIDIA-Nemotron-3.5-Bolt is an open-weight language model from NVIDIA. NVIDIA-Nemotron-3.5-Bolt-74B-A9B-BF16 (BF16) weighs 150 GB; the smallest configuration that runs it is B200 180 GB.

For self-hosting, compare this build's requirements below with the GPU you plan to rent.

  • NVIDIA-Nemotron-3.5-Bolt is a small language model with 8.0B parameters, designed for fast local voice and device assistants.
  • It supports a context length of 65536 tokens and is licensed under the OpenMDW-1.1 agreement.
  • The model supports English, Arabic, Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, German, Greek, Spanish, and other languages.

Summary of the nvidia/NVIDIA-Nemotron-3.5-Bolt-E4B-BF16 model card, 2026-10-25. The estimate below is for another build of the family.

What it is

Released byNVIDIA
Released2026-10-05
Parameters8.0B
VRAM150 GB for the weights

What it runs on

Memory and cards for NVIDIA-Nemotron-3.5-Bolt-74B-A9B-BF16 (BF16)

150 GBweights, file size
762 MBruntime overhead, at least
65,536 tokenscontext max

How much memory each request adds isn't estimated yet for this architecture. The weights need at least the cards below, plus room for the context.

CardWeights alone
RTX 3060 12 GB … H200 141 GB
11 smaller cards
does not fit
B200 180 GBtight
8× H100 80 GB
tensor parallel
does not fit
8× A100 80 GB
tensor parallel
does not fit
8× H200 141 GB
tensor parallel
does not fit

Builds

Sizes, precisions & builds

BuildParamsPrecisionWeightsSmallest setup
NVIDIA-Nemotron-3.5-Bolt-E4B-BF16 ↗ 8.0BBF16 16.0 GB2× RTX 3060 12 GB
NVIDIA-Nemotron-3.5-Bolt-74B-A9B-BF16 (above) ↗ 74.9BBF16 150 GBB200 180 GB
NVIDIA-Nemotron-3.5-Bolt-74B-A9B-GGUF ↗
packaged by unsloth
2 builds: GGUF 998 MB … IQ2_XXS 22.0 GB
GGUF 22.0 GBRTX 4090 24 GB

From the model card

What NVIDIA says about NVIDIA-Nemotron-3.5-Bolt

Read the model card

Description

NVIDIA-Nemotron-3.5-Bolt-E4B-BF16 is a small language model (SLM) further post-trained from Gemma-4-E4B-it by NVIDIA. This is the full-precision (BF16) release. Nemotron-3.5-Bolt-E4B carries forward Gemma’s strong conversational capabilities and further improves multi-turn tool use, instruction following, and input grounding for fast local voice/device assistants, interactive personas, and embedded/edge interfaces. Designed for low-memory, low-TTFT operation, the model allows agents to respond quickly while preserving headroom for applications or adjacent model pipelines.

For speculative decoding, use the companion DFlash drafter. For the Q4_K_M quantized version, see NVIDIA-Nemotron-3.5-Bolt-E4B-4GB.

This model is ready for commercial or non‑commercial use.

Model Summary

Total Parameters8B (4B effective)
ArchitectureGemma-4-E4B
PrecisionBF16
Context LengthInput: up to 64K tokens; output: up to 64K tokens
Inputs / OutputsText / text
DeploymentvLLM; full-precision customization, post-training, and evaluation
Reasoning ModeChat-template controls (enable_thinking=True/False) and runtime thinking budget
Conversational ModeChat-template controls (conversational_mode=True/False)
Recommended SamplingTemperature 1.0, top_p 0.95 in both thinking modes
Best ForLocal voice and device assistants, interactive personas, and embedded interfaces
LicenseOpenMDW-1.1

Model Overview

Model Developer: NVIDIA Corporation

Model Dates: December 2025 - May 2026

Data Freshness:

  • The post-training data has a cutoff date of May 2026.

What is Nemotron?

NVIDIA Nemotron™ is a family of open models with open weights, training data, and recipes, delivering leading efficiency and accuracy for building specialized AI agents.

Quick Start

To get quickly started on a single H100 you can use the following command.

Run it with vLLM! (vLLM v0.31.0: vllm/vllm-openai:v0.31.0)

Without Speculative Decoding

export MODEL=nvidia/NVIDIA-Nemotron-3.5-Bolt-E4B-BF16

vllm serve "$MODEL" \
  --served-model-name "nemotron-bolt" \
  --host 0.0.0.0 \
  --port 8000 \
  --dtype bfloat16 \
  --tensor-parallel-size 1 \
  --gpu-memory-utilization 0.85 \
  --kv-cache-dtype auto \
  --max-model-len 65536 \
  --max-num-seqs 64 \
  --max-num-batched-tokens 65536 \
  --chat-template "$MODEL/chat_template.jinja" \
  --enable-auto-tool-choice \
  --tool-call-parser gemma4 \
  --reasoning-parser gemma4 \
  --limit-mm-per-prompt '{"image":0,"video":0,"audio":0}'

With DFlash Speculative Decoding

Use the same downloaded BF16 checkpoint with its companion DFlash drafter. Run one serving configuration at a time. This example uses a single concurrent sequence and seven speculative tokens; tune these settings for your workload.

export MODEL=nvidia/NVIDIA-Nemotron-3.5-Bolt-E4B-BF16
export DRAFTER_CKPT=nvidia/NVIDIA-Nemotron-3.5-Bolt-E4B-BF16-DFlash-NVFP4

vllm serve "$MODEL" \
  --served-model-name "nemotron-bolt" \
  --host 0.0.0.0 \
  --port 8000 \
  --dtype bfloat16 \
  --tensor-parallel-size 1 \
  --gpu-memory-utilization 0.85 \
  --kv-cache-dtype auto \
  --max-model-len 65536 \
  --max-num-seqs 1 \
  --max-num-batched-tokens 65536 \
  --chat-template "$MODEL/chat_template.jinja" \
  --enable-auto-tool-choice \
  --tool-call-parser gemma4 \
  --reasoning-parser gemma4 \
  --limit-mm-per-prompt '{"image":0,"video":0,"audio":0}' \
  --speculative-config "{
    \"method\": \"dflash\",
    \"model\": \"$DRAFTER_CKPT\",
    \"num_speculative_tokens\": 7
  }"

Sample Request

The same request works with either serving configuration.

curl -s "http://:8000/v1/chat/completions" \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{
    "model": "nemotron-bolt",
    "messages": [
      {"role": "user", "content": "What is 17 multiplied by 23?"}
    ],
    "temperature": 0.0,
    "max_tokens": 512,
    "skip_special_tokens": false,
    "chat_template_kwargs": {
      "enable_thinking": true
    }
  }'

For more details on how to deploy and use the model — see the Quick Start Guide below!

License/Terms of Use

Governing Terms: Use of this model is governed by the OpenMDW License Agreement, version 1.1. This model has been post-trained on the Google Gemma 4 model, and use of the Google Gemma 4 model is governed by Apache License, Version 2.0

Benchmarks

We evaluated our model on the following benchmarks:

BenchmarkNemotron-3.5Bolt-E4BBF16Gemma4E4B-itBF16Qwen3.54BBF16Nemotron-3Nano-4BBF16Nemotron-3.5Bolt-E4B-4GBQ4_K_MGemma4E4B-itQ4_K_MQwen3.54BQ4_K_MNemotron-3Nano-4BQ4_K_M
MultiChallenge53.1042.0851.7635.3055.6039.3652.2334.53
RoleBench67.0549.9553.6612.0271.2160.5152.3510.86
RoleMRC80.6374.6265.8147.0079.1275.2462.6145.84
EQ-Bench v339.4041.1732.9219.3138.1539.7732.0719.45
Brevity Benchmark82.5279.9975.3573.6082.8478.4975.1770.98
BFCL-v368.5166.3970.9561.1067.31

Quoted from the model card on Hugging Face. The full card is behind the Hugging Face link above.

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