2026-10-01T18:31:29.000ZNVIDIA · Generative AIFor builders

Dense vs. MoE Models: Active Parameters, Throughput, and When to Choose Each

How can a 30B-parameter model activate only 3B parameters per token, and still use the capacity of the larger model? Nemotron 3.5 Lightning illustrates the...

Why it matters

NVIDIA published a model update. If you use a hosted chat, read the source before you assume your usual model changed.

What you can do

Nemotron 3.5 Lightning is on the cloud board. List cost is $0.059 in and $0.17 out per million tokens.

For builders

Try Nemotron 3.5 Lightning. Copy the OpenRouter call.

Copy

curl https://openrouter.ai/api/v1/chat/completions \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $OPENROUTER_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"model":"nvidia/nemotron-3.5-lightning","messages":[{"role":"user","content":"Hello"}]}'

Open the source

See Nemotron 3.5 Lightning Plan a job from this

Dense vs. MoE Models: Active Parameters, Throughput, and When to Choose Each

Updated 1 min ago

How can a 30B-parameter model activate only 3B parameters per token, and still use the capacity of the larger model? Nemotron 3.5 Lightning illustrates the...

Why it matters

NVIDIA published a model update. If you use a hosted chat, read the source before you assume your usual model changed.

What you can do

Nemotron 3.5 Lightning is on the cloud board. List cost is $0.059 in and $0.17 out per million tokens.

For builders

Try Nemotron 3.5 Lightning. Copy the OpenRouter call.

Copy

curl https://openrouter.ai/api/v1/chat/completions \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $OPENROUTER_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"model":"nvidia/nemotron-3.5-lightning","messages":[{"role":"user","content":"Hello"}]}'

Open the source

See Nemotron 3.5 Lightning Plan a job from this

Dense vs. MoE Models: Active Parameters, Throughput, and When to Choose Each

Why it matters

What you can do

For builders

Copy

Tags

Dense vs. MoE Models: Active Parameters, Throughput, and When to Choose Each

Why it matters

What you can do

For builders

Copy

Tags