Vercel AI Gateway adds free access to NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Lightning
Nemotron 3.5 Lightning, an open-weight reasoning and chat model from NVIDIA, is now available for free on Vercel AI Gateway under the model ID nvidia/nemotron-3.5-lightning-free. The model has 30B total parameters with 3B active per token, a 1M token context window, and supports tool calling and structured outputs.
Why it matters
Builders can call a 1M-context open-weight model through AI Gateway at no cost, which is useful for long-running agents, sub-agent workflows, chatbots, and RAG systems. The provider may retain prompts for model improvement, so data handling should be reviewed before sending sensitive content.
Who should care
Developers building AI agents, chatbot operators, RAG system builders, and teams using Vercel AI Gateway
What you can do
Call nvidia/nemotron-3.5-lightning-free through the AI SDK or Chat Completions API on AI Gateway and test it against your current model on a representative workload.