Run Nemotron 3 Nano: Efficient Open Coding Agent

NVIDIA just turned the open-model conversation upside down. The Nemotron 3 family — Nano, Super, and Ultra — ships with open weights, open training data, and open recipes, and it is built for one job above all others: running agents that think for a long time without bankrupting you on tokens. The headline news this week is the full family landing, with the 500B-class Ultra rounding out the lineup. But the model most developers will actually wire into their own projects is the smallest one: Nemotron 3 Nano.

Nano is a 30-billion-parameter hybrid mixture-of-experts model that activates only up to 3 billion parameters per token. It carries a 1-million-token context window, runs roughly 4x faster than the previous Nemotron 2 Nano, and was independently ranked by Artificial Analysis as the most efficient open model in its size class with leading accuracy. It is free to try on OpenRouter, downloadable from Hugging Face, and small enough to self-host. That combination is exactly why it is blowing up across developer communities right now.