NVIDIA NIM (NVIDIA Inference Microservices) is a catalog of GPU-accelerated, containerized AI inference microservices that package optimized model engines (TensorRT-LLM, vLLM, SGLang, Triton) behind industry-standard OpenAI-compatible REST APIs. NIM covers large language models, embeddings and reranking, vision-language models, speech (Riva), visual generative AI, and biology (BioNeMo) — exposed identically whether consumed from the hosted endpoint at integrate.api.nvidia.com or self-hosted via Docker containers and the Kubernetes-native NIM Operator. NIM ships with NVIDIA AI Enterprise for commercial deployment and is the inference layer underneath NVIDIA AI Blueprints, NeMo Retriever, NeMo Guardrails, and the broader NVIDIA developer stack.
NVIDIA NIM publishes 10 API contracts indexed on the APIs.io network, including Completions API, Embeddings API, Reranking API, and 7 more. Tagged areas include Artificial Intelligence, Inference, Microservices, LLM, and Foundation Models.
The NVIDIA NIM catalog on APIs.io includes 1 JSON-LD context and 1 Spectral governance ruleset.
NVIDIA NIM’s developer surface includes authentication, developer portal, documentation, getting-started guide, signup flow, sandbox, pricing, and 70 more developer resources.
The questions people put to an LLM, and the jobs they hand an agent, that NVIDIA NIM's APIs answer — each one linked to the operation that does it.
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Legacy OpenAI-compatible text completion endpoint (/v1/completions) for non-chat foundation models served by NIM. Accepts a raw prompt and returns generated text with the same s...
OpenAI-compatible embeddings endpoint (/v1/embeddings) backed by NVIDIA NeMo Retriever text embedding models including NV-Embed, NV-EmbedQA-E5, llama-3.2-nv-embedqa-1b, and BAAI...
NeMo Retriever cross-encoder reranking endpoint (/v1/ranking) for scoring candidate passages against a query. Improves retrieval relevance on RAG pipelines and supports the llam...
OpenAI-compatible model catalog endpoint (/v1/models) returning the list of models served by the NIM endpoint or container. Each entry includes id, owned_by, and created timesta...
Liveness, readiness, and startup probes exposed by self-hosted NIM containers (/v1/health/live, /v1/health/ready) and a Prometheus /v1/metrics scrape endpoint for GPU utilizatio...
BioNeMo NIMs for protein structure prediction (AlphaFold2, ESMFold, OpenFold), protein generation (ProtGPT2, RFDiffusion), molecular property prediction (MolMIM), small molecule...
100+ foundation models exposed through a single API contract — Llama 3.1/3.2/3.3, Mistral, Mixtral, NVIDIA Nemotron, DeepSeek-R1, Qwen 2.5, Microsoft Phi, Google Gemma, IBM Granite, and Falcon
Free hosted inference at build.nvidia.com on DGX Cloud — 1,000 credits on signup, 40 RPM rate limit
Self-hosted deployment via Docker containers shipping TensorRT-LLM, vLLM, or SGLang inference engines
Kubernetes-native deployment via the NIM Operator with NIMService, NIMCache, NIMPipeline CRDs
GPU-aware autoscaling, persistent model caches, and rolling upgrades managed by the operator
Multi-tenant licensing through NVIDIA AI Enterprise (commercial production use)
NeMo Retriever NIMs for embeddings, reranking, OCR, and PDF-to-Markdown extraction in RAG pipelines
Vision Language Model NIMs reusing the chat-completions surface for multimodal inputs
NVIDIA Riva speech NIMs (Parakeet ASR, Canary translation, Magpie TTS) with HTTP and gRPC adapters
BioNeMo NIMs for AlphaFold2, ESMFold, ProtGPT2, MolMIM, DiffDock, RFDiffusion
Visual generative AI NIMs — FLUX.1, SDXL, Shutterstock Edify Image, Edify 3D
NeMo Guardrails for input/output safety and topic policy enforcement
Function calling, JSON mode, tool use, and structured outputs across compatible LLMs
Streaming via Server-Sent Events on chat/completions
Prometheus /v1/metrics scrape endpoint and /v1/health/{live,ready} probes for Kubernetes
LangChain, LlamaIndex, Haystack, OpenAI SDK, and direct REST client compatibility
NVIDIA AI Blueprints — full reference RAG, multimodal search, drug discovery, and digital human stacks
Available on DGX Cloud, AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud, GKE, EKS, AKS, OpenShift, and on-prem
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