Compare / Nemotron 3.5 Bolt 74B-A9B vs Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Thinking

Nemotron 3.5 Bolt 74B-A9B vs Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Thinking

Updated November 2026

Verdict

Nemotron 3.5 Bolt 74B-A9B scores higher on the Small LM Index: 73.3 vs 63.3. On the 1 benchmark both labs report, Nemotron 3.5 Bolt 74B-A9B wins 1 and Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Thinking wins 0. Nemotron 3.5 Bolt 74B-A9B is smaller: it needs about 46.9 GB of memory at 4-bit, against 50.8 GB for Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Thinking. Neither model has a hosted API on OpenRouter, so you would run both yourself.

Pick Nemotron 3.5 Bolt 74B-A9B if…

you want the strongest model overall
you have limited memory (about 46.9 GB at 4-bit)
you need image input

Pick Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Thinking if…

you need a permissive license (Apache-2.0)
you want the more widely used model (more quantized builds and community support)

Specifications

	Nemotron 3.5 Bolt 74B-A9B	Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Thinking
Small LM Index	73.3 (likely 72–75)	63.3 (likely 59–67)
Lab	NVIDIA · United States	Alibaba (Qwen) · China
Released	2026-10-12	2025-09-11
Parameters	74B (9B active, MoE)	80B (3B active, MoE)
Memory at 4-bit	~46.9 GB	~50.8 GB
Context window	262K tokens	262K tokens
Input	text, image	text
Reasoning	Hybrid (thinking on/off)	Always thinks
License	OpenMDW-1.1	Apache-2.0
API price / 1M tokens	Self-host only	Self-host only
Hugging Face downloads (30 days)	7.7K	43.8K

Benchmarks

Higher is better. Bold marks the winner where both labs report a score. ≈ marks the index model's estimate for a score that wasn't reported, ✓ an independent measurement and * a score measured by another lab.

Benchmark	Nemotron 3.5 Bolt 74B-A9B	Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Thinking
MMLU-Pro Knowledge	≈ 86	82.7
GPQA Diamond Knowledge	88.8	77.2
Humanity's Last Exam Reasoning	28.7	≈ 13
AIME Math	≈ 95	87.8
LiveCodeBench Coding	≈ 84	68.7
Terminal-Bench Agentic	53.9	—
IFBench Instruction following	—	61.5
AA-LCR Long context	67.4	—

Scores are mostly reported by each lab with its own settings, so small gaps are noise. See the methodology. Open in the interactive comparison to add more models.

Questions

Which is better, Nemotron 3.5 Bolt 74B-A9B or Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Thinking?

Nemotron 3.5 Bolt 74B-A9B scores higher on the Small LM Index: 73.3 vs 63.3. On the 1 benchmark both labs report, Nemotron 3.5 Bolt 74B-A9B wins 1 and Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Thinking wins 0.

Which is cheaper to run?

Neither model has a hosted API on OpenRouter, so you would run both yourself. Nemotron 3.5 Bolt 74B-A9B is smaller: it needs about 46.9 GB of memory at 4-bit, against 50.8 GB for Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Thinking.

Which has the longer context window?

Both have a 262K-token context window.

Can I use Nemotron 3.5 Bolt 74B-A9B and Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Thinking commercially?

Nemotron 3.5 Bolt 74B-A9B is released under OpenMDW-1.1 and Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Thinking under Apache-2.0. Apache 2.0 and MIT allow commercial use; other licenses can add conditions, so read the license before shipping a product.