NVIDIA: Nemotron Nano 12B 2 VL (free)✓ Catalog verified
NVIDIA Nemotron Nano 2 VL is a 12-billion-parameter open multimodal reasoning model designed for video understanding and document intelligence. It introduces a hybrid Transformer-Mamba architecture, combining transformer-level accuracy with Mamba’s memory-efficient sequence modeling for significantly higher throughput and lower latency. The model supports inputs of text and multi-image documents, producing natural-language outputs. It is trained on high-quality NVIDIA-curated synthetic datasets optimized for optical-character recognition, chart reasoning, and multimodal comprehension. Nemotron Nano 2 VL achieves leading results on OCRBench v2 and scores ≈ 74 average across MMMU, MathVista, AI2D, OCRBench, OCR-Reasoning, ChartQA, DocVQA, and Video-MME—surpassing prior open VL baselines. With Efficient Video Sampling (EVS), it handles long-form videos while reducing inference cost. Open-weights, training data, and fine-tuning recipes are released under a permissive NVIDIA open license, with deployment supported across NeMo, NIM, and major inference runtimes.
Overview
NVIDIA Nemotron Nano 2 VL is a 12-billion-parameter open multimodal reasoning model designed for video understanding and document intelligence. It introduces a hybrid Transformer-Mamba architecture, combining transformer-level accuracy with Mamba’s memory-efficient sequence modeling for significantly higher throughput and lower latency. The model supports inputs of text and multi-image documents, producing natural-language outputs. It is trained on high-quality NVIDIA-curated synthetic datasets optimized for optical-character recognition, chart reasoning, and multimodal comprehension. Nemotron Nano 2 VL achieves leading results on OCRBench v2 and scores ≈ 74 average across MMMU, MathVista, AI2D, OCRBench, OCR-Reasoning, ChartQA, DocVQA, and Video-MME—surpassing prior open VL baselines. With Efficient Video Sampling (EVS), it handles long-form videos while reducing inference cost. Open-weights, training data, and fine-tuning recipes are released under a permissive NVIDIA open license, with deployment supported across NeMo, NIM, and major inference runtimes.
Access: available through the official Nvidia API. Context window: 128K.
Specifications
| API identifier | nvidia/nemotron-nano-12b-v2-vl:free |
| Provider | Nvidia |
| Model type | Multimodal LLM |
| Context window | 128K catalog |
| Input modalities | image · text · video |
| Output modalities | text |
| Released | Oct 28, 2025 |
| Moderated | No |
| Architecture modality | text+image+video->text |
API defaults
{
"top_p": null,
"temperature": null,
"frequency_penalty": null
}Pricing
Live pricing components for nvidia/nemotron-nano-12b-v2-vl:free as published in the catalog.
| Pricing component | Raw unit price | Normalized | Unit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Prompt tokens | $0 | $0.00 / 1M | Per input token |
| Completion tokens | $0 | $0.00 / 1M | Per output token |
| Request fee | N/A | N/A | Per request |
| Image fee | N/A | N/A | Per image unit |
| Web search fee | N/A | N/A | Per search request |
Cost calculator
Estimate monthly spend from your own token volumes.
Estimated Total Cost
$0Calculated from current list pricing in the ModelsAtlas catalog.Capabilities
| Capability | Status | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Visual Understanding | ✓ Supported | Image and document analysis support |
| Audio Processing | Not advertised | Speech and voice aligned flows |
| Tool Calling | ✓ Supported | Supports tools / function calling |
| Self-Hosting | Not advertised | Deploy outside managed APIs |
Capability signals
Directional signals derived from model metadata and capability tags — not official benchmark submissions.
Quick start
Call NVIDIA: Nemotron Nano 12B 2 VL (free) through an OpenAI-compatible client.
from openai import OpenAI
client = OpenAI(
base_url="https://openrouter.ai/api/v1",
api_key="YOUR_API_KEY"
)
response = client.chat.completions.create(
model="nvidia/nemotron-nano-12b-v2-vl:free",
messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Explain quantum physics."}]
)
print(response.choices[0].message.content)Alternatives
Closest models by context window from a different provider.
| Model | Provider | Context | Input /1M | Actions |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AllenAI: Olmo 2 32B Instruct | Allenai | 128K | $0.05 | View → |
| Amazon: Nova Micro 1.0 | Amazon | 128K | $0.04 | View → |
Sources & attribution
Pricing and metadata are maintained in the ModelsAtlas catalog.
Frequently asked questions
How much does NVIDIA: Nemotron Nano 12B 2 VL (free) cost?
$0.00 per 1M input tokens and $0.00 per 1M output tokens on the official Nvidia API.
What is the context window of NVIDIA: Nemotron Nano 12B 2 VL (free)?
NVIDIA: Nemotron Nano 12B 2 VL (free) supports up to 128K tokens of context.
Does NVIDIA: Nemotron Nano 12B 2 VL (free) support tool / function calling?
Yes, NVIDIA: Nemotron Nano 12B 2 VL (free) supports tool / function calling — you can register tools and the model will emit structured tool calls.
How do I access NVIDIA: Nemotron Nano 12B 2 VL (free)?
Use the official Nvidia API with the model id `nvidia/nemotron-nano-12b-v2-vl:free`. See the Quick start section above for code examples.