Nvidia's Nemotron 3 Ultra becomes the smartest open US model, but China still leads

Jun 1, 2026

According to benchmark platform Artificial Analysis, Nvidia's new Nemotron 3 Ultra is the most capable open AI model from the US to date. It has roughly 550 billion total parameters, with about 55 billion active at any given time. On the Artificial Analysis intelligence ranking, Nemotron 3 Ultra scores 48 points, well ahead of other open US models like Gemma 4 31B (39), Nemotron 3 Super (36), and gpt-oss-120b (33). It doesn't reach the top open models from China, though. Kimi K2.6 scores 54 points there. The current strongest closed model, Opus 4.8, hits 61 points.

Nemotron 3 Ultra lands in the "most attractive quadrant" of the Artificial Analysis chart, combining high intelligence scores with fast output speed. | Image: AAII

On provider DeepInfra, Nemotron 3 Ultra also delivers more than 300 tokens per second, according to Artificial Analysis. Comparably sized models from DeepSeek or Moonshot currently manage only 50 to 100. Nvidia says the model will be released on June 4 on Hugging Face, OpenRouter, and other platforms.

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