Model comparison
Mistral Large 3 vs NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra
Mistral against NVIDIA, compared on context, price, and verified benchmark results.
Catalog record checked September 5, 2026Individual provider fields may changeEvidence confidence: High — see receipts below
Mistral
Mistral Large 3
Frontier · Open weights
NVIDIA
NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra
Frontier · Open weights
| Specification | Mistral Large 3 | NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Mistral | NVIDIA |
| Tier | Frontier | Frontier |
| Context window | 262K | Winner: 1M |
| Max output | 262K | Not verifiedUnverified |
| Input / 1M tokens | $0.50 | $0.50 |
| Output / 1M tokens | Winner: $1.50 | $2.20 |
| Weights | Open | Open |
| Parameters | 675B total / 41B active (sparse MoE) | 550B total / 55B active (MoE) |
| Reasoning levels | Not verifiedUnverified | low, high, max |
| Modalities | text, image | text |
| License | Apache 2.0 | Not disclosedUnverified |
| API model id | mistral-large-3 | nemotron-3-ultra-550b-a55b |
| Released | December 1, 2025 | June 4, 2026 |
| Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index (2026-08-14) | 46 | Winner: 54 |
| GPQA Diamond (2025-12-02) | 43.9 | Not verifiedUnverified |
Prices are USD per million tokens at standard rates, excluding batch and caching discounts. Bold indicates the better figure where one is objectively better. Values we could not confirm from the provider are shown as “Not verified” rather than estimated.
Benchmark receipts
- 2026-08-14: Artificial AnalysisComposite index blending reasoning, knowledge, and coding evals into one 0–100 score. Comparability: directly comparable — AA occasionally rebaselines the index scale between snapshots — a score captured on one date is only comparable to same-snapshot scores (check measuredAt).
- 2025-12-02: Mistral — Introducing Mistral 3 (vendor, base model, 5-shot no CoT); independent review concursGraduate-level science reasoning: multiple-choice questions written by domain PhDs. Comparability: comparable with caveat — Small question pool: differences under ~2 points are within run-to-run noise. Chain-of-thought vs direct answering must match to compare.
Pricing tiers: Mistral Large 3: Mistral first-party API $0.50/$1.50 per MTok; cached input $0.05/MTok. Open weights (Apache 2.0), EU-hosted. · NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra: Open weights (weights + data + recipes); $0.50/$2.20 per MTok is the third-party hosted rate (OpenRouter). 550B/55B MoE.
Mistral Large 3
Mistral Large 3 is Mistral's flagship — 262K-context, multimodal, Apache-2.0 open-weight at $0.50/$1.50.
Best for
- Open-weight deployments
- Multimodal EU-hosted inference
- Balanced frontier work
Watch out
Verify multimodal support and EU data-residency on your endpoint.
NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra
Nemotron 3 Ultra is NVIDIA's open-weight (550B/55B) frontier MoE with a 1M-token context.
Best for
- Open-weight frontier
- Self-hosting on NVIDIA GPUs
- Reasoning
Watch out
Top US open-weight until Thinking Machines Inkling; verify hosted pricing.
When the cheaper one wins
Mistral Large 3 is cheaper on output at $1.50 per million tokens against $2.20 for NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra — about 1.5×. Use the cheaper tier for classification, extraction, summarisation, and any task where the expensive model’s extra score does not change the accepted output. The expensive one only pays if your hardest task actually fails on the cheap tier. These are standard-tier API rates, excluding batch and cache discounts.
Run the model pickerEvidence confidence: High
How strong and complete the evidence behind this comparison is — not a prediction of which model is better.
- Pricing verified on both sides — Input and output rates are verified for both models.
- 3/5 core specs verified on both sides — Not published for at least one side: max output, reasoning levels.
- 1 shared named benchmark with differing scores — Measured on: Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index.
- Verified within the last 90 days — Newest catalog check was 6 days ago.
- Both models carry source citations — Each side has at least two catalog sources on record.
Source receipts
Each catalog figure was checked against the provider or an independent second source on the date shown.
- Mistral Large 3: Mistral docs — mistral-large-2512 (675B total / 41B active, 256K) (accessed 2026-09-05)
- Mistral Large 3: Mistral — Introducing Mistral 3 (sparse MoE parameters) (accessed 2026-09-05)
- NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra: NVIDIA — Nemotron (accessed 2026-08-29)
- NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra: NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra (accessed 2026-08-29)
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Diving deeper on one model? Mistral Large 3 · NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra
Common questions
Mistral Large 3 vs NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra
Answered from the verified figures on this page rather than general guidance.
Is Mistral Large 3 or NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra cheaper for input?
Both cost $0.50 per million input tokens at standard rates, so input price is not a deciding factor between them.
Is Mistral Large 3 or NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra cheaper for output?
Mistral Large 3 is cheaper at $1.50 per million output tokens, against $2.20 for NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra — roughly 1.5× the price. Output tokens usually dominate a real bill, so weigh the output rate more heavily than the input rate. These are base rates; Mistral Large 3 has tiered pricing: Mistral first-party API $0.50/$1.50 per MTok; cached input $0.05/MTok. Open weights (Apache 2.0), EU-hosted. NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra has tiered pricing: Open weights (weights + data + recipes); $0.50/$2.20 per MTok is the third-party hosted rate (OpenRouter). 550B/55B MoE.
Which has the larger context window, Mistral Large 3 or NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra?
NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra accepts 1M tokens against 262K for Mistral Large 3. This only matters if you routinely send very long documents or large codebases.
Should I use Mistral Large 3 or NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra?
Both sit in the frontier tier, so the choice usually comes down to price and context rather than capability. Mistral Large 3 suits open-weight deployments; NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra suits open-weight frontier.
Next step
Choosing between them
The verified figures that separate this pair, computed from the catalog rather than restated boilerplate.
- Context: NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra takes 1M against 262K for Mistral Large 3 — only decisive if your prompts approach the smaller window.
- Measured capability: NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra leads Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index 54 to 46 (measured 2026-08-14).
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