NIM Offerings

NVIDIA publishes inference microservices under two offerings: NIM and NIM Certified. NIM prioritizes rapid access to newly available models. NIM Certified provides broader hardware validation and enterprise lifecycle options for production deployments through Feature Branch (FB) and Production Branch (PB) releases.

NIM

NIM is the offering that delivers NIMs that are validated to be functional on a small set of NVIDIA GPUs and published within about 72 hours (up to three days) of upstream model availability.

NIM is available at no charge under the applicable license terms. It is not covered by NVIDIA Enterprise support.

Who it is for: Anyone who wants to try new models quickly. It fits early exploration for all customers.

NIM Certified

NIM Certified is the enterprise production offering and supports broad compatibility across the NVIDIA hardware installed base, documented refresh cadence, CVE handling, rolling inference stack updates, and validation patterns aligned to NVIDIA AI Enterprise branch rules (Feature Branch and Production Branch). This is the offering for organizations that require predictable maintenance, compliance-oriented, and long-term operational expectations.

NIM Certified Feature Branch is available at no charge under the applicable license terms. An active NVIDIA AI Enterprise subscription is required for enterprise support. NIM Certified Production Branch requires an active NVIDIA AI Enterprise subscription.

The list of NIM Certified models is available on the NGC Catalog site.

Who it is for: Enterprise IT, regulated environments, global system integrators, and independent software vendors that need CVE SLAs, STIG/FIPS (where applicable for Production Branch), fixed-software baselines for PB cycles, and enterprise support via NVIDIA AI Enterprise.

For more information, refer to Enterprise-Grade Inference Software Stack.

Summary

The following table summarizes the purpose, availability, and support option for each NIM offering:

Offering	Best for	Availability	Support
NIM	Exploration and rapid access to newly available models	Available at no charge under the applicable license terms	Community support through the NVIDIA Developer Forums
NIM Certified — Feature Branch	Production deployments that prioritize newer capabilities and can adopt frequent software updates	Available at no charge under the applicable license terms	Community support through the NVIDIA Developer Forums. NVIDIA Enterprise Support requires an active NVIDIA AI Enterprise subscription.
NIM Certified — Production Branch	Mission-critical, security-sensitive, or regulated production deployments requiring a stable baseline and predictable security maintenance	Requires an active NVIDIA AI Enterprise subscription	NVIDIA Enterprise Support is included with an active NVIDIA AI Enterprise subscription

Government Ready versions are available for designated NIM Certified Production Branch containers. Availability varies by product, architecture, and image tag. See the NGC Catalog for the current list of NIM Certified models and Government Ready images.