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NVIDIA NIM website screenshot

NVIDIA NIM

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.

agent native

Reference-quality API operations across every facet — a rich contract, published governance, transparent operations, and machine-readable commercial terms.

Kin Score

API Evangelist profiles NVIDIA NIM the way a machine reads it — 93 machine-readable artifacts across 11 APIs, pulled from the provider's own public surface and indexed so a developer, an analyst, or an AI agent can evaluate it against every other provider on the network.

Every provider in the network is reduced to the same set of machine-readable artifacts — OpenAPI contracts, event specifications, GraphQL schemas, runnable collections, pricing and rate-limit signals, security posture, OAuth scopes, and the agent surfaces (MCP servers and skills) that let software drive the API on its own. We profile them because the interface is the part of a company you can actually inspect: it is a truer signal of what a provider does than any marketing page. From those artifacts we compute the Kin Score — NVIDIA NIM scores 73.4/100 (exemplar), with a separate agent-readiness read of 83/100 (agent native). The full breakdown is below, followed by every artifact we hold — each card links through to its machine-readable definition on apis.io.

Kin Score

This is the API Evangelist rating — a single, repeatable read computed from the artifacts on this page. Green fill is points earned; the red track is points possible, so every bar shows earned-versus-possible at a glance.

Kin Score Kin Score How this is scored →
scored 2026-07-27 · rubric v0.5
Composite quality — 73.4/100 · exemplar
Contract Quality 18.7 / 25
Developer Ergonomics 16.5 / 20
Commercial Clarity 15.8 / 20
Operational Transparency 4.8 / 13
Governance 8.8 / 12
Discoverability 8.8 / 10
Agent readiness — 83/100 · agent native
Machine-Readable Contract 18 / 18
Agentic Access Contract 15 / 15
MCP Server 12 / 12
Machine-Readable Auth 10 / 10
Idempotency 0 / 9
Stable Error Semantics 8 / 8
Request/Response Examples 7 / 7
Rate-Limit Signaling 7 / 7
Typed Event Surface 0 / 6
Agent Skills 5 / 5
Well-Known Catalog 4 / 4
Consent & Bot Identity 0 / 3

How we profile NVIDIA NIM

Each block below is one kind of artifact we hold for NVIDIA NIM. For each we say what it is and why it earns a place in the profile, then list every one we've indexed — capped at two rows, scroll within the panel for the rest.

APIs 11

Each API is captured as its own OpenAPI definition — every operation, parameter, and response. This is the single most useful machine-readable description of what an API does, and it's what lets us score, lint, mock, and generate against it without asking the provider for anything.

Individual APIs this provider publishes, each with its own machine-readable definition.

NVIDIA NIM Completions API

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...

NVIDIA NIM Embeddings API

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...

NVIDIA NIM Reranking API

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...

NVIDIA NIM Models API

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...

NVIDIA NIM Vision Language Models API

Vision-language model inference through the standard /v1/chat/completions surface with image inputs (base64 or URL) in the messages payload. Supports NVIDIA NeVA, microsoft/kosm...

NVIDIA NIM Health API

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...

NVIDIA NIM Biology (BioNeMo) API

BioNeMo NIMs for protein structure prediction (AlphaFold2, ESMFold, OpenFold), protein generation (ProtGPT2, RFDiffusion), molecular property prediction (MolMIM), small molecule...

NVIDIA NIM ASR API

Automatic speech recognition (speech-to-text)

NVIDIA NIM Chat API

OpenAI-compatible chat completion operations

NVIDIA NIM Images API

Text-to-image and image-to-image generation

NVIDIA NIM TTS API

Text-to-speech synthesis

Scroll within the panel for all 11 ·

Postman Collections 10

A runnable collection turns the contract into something a developer can execute in seconds. We profile them because the fastest way to trust an API is to make a real call against it.

Ready-to-run Postman collections for exercising this provider's APIs.

Scroll within the panel for all 10 ·

Open Collections 10

Open, tool-agnostic collections carry the same runnable value as Postman without locking you to one client — the portable, forkable form of the same exercise.

Open, tool-agnostic API collections (OpenAPI-derived and Bruno).

Scroll within the panel for all 10 ·

Arazzo Workflows 7

Real integrations are rarely a single call. Arazzo describes the multi-step sequences — auth, then create, then confirm — so both a human and an agent can follow the choreography, not just the endpoints.

Multi-step API workflows described with the Arazzo specification.

NVIDIA NIM BioNeMo Drug Discovery

Fold a protein from sequence, dock a ligand into the predicted structure, then generate optimized analog molecules.

ARAZZO

NVIDIA NIM Discover And Chat

List the served models, confirm a target model's metadata, then run a chat completion against it.

ARAZZO

NVIDIA NIM Generate Image And Caption

Generate an image from a text prompt, then caption the generated image with a vision-language model.

ARAZZO

NVIDIA NIM Health Gated Completion

Check a self-hosted NIM container's readiness, and only run a text completion once the engine reports ready.

ARAZZO

NVIDIA NIM RAG Rerank And Answer

Embed a query, rerank candidate passages against it, then answer the question grounded in the top passage.

ARAZZO

NVIDIA NIM Vision Describe And Summarize

Describe an image with a vision-language model, then condense the description into a short caption with an LLM.

ARAZZO

NVIDIA NIM Voice Assistant Loop

Transcribe an audio clip with Riva ASR, answer the transcript with an LLM, then synthesize the reply with Riva TTS.

ARAZZO

Scroll within the panel for all 7 ·

MCP Servers 1

Model Context Protocol servers expose these APIs directly to AI agents. We profile them because agent-native access is the fastest-growing way this provider's capabilities actually get used.

Model Context Protocol servers that expose these APIs to AI agents.

nvidia-nim-mcp.yml

MCP SERVER

Agent Skills 24

An agent skill packages the how-to for driving these APIs from an assistant — the prompts, the sequence, the guardrails — so the knowledge to use the API travels with it.

Packaged agent skills for driving this provider's APIs from an AI assistant.

Scroll within the panel for all 24 ·

Pricing Plans 1

Pricing is part of the interface. Machine-readable plans tell you what a tier costs and includes before you commit — one of the six things the Kin Score reads for commercial clarity.

Published pricing tiers and plan structures.

Rate Limits 1

Rate limits are the difference between a demo that works and a production integration that doesn't fall over. Publishing them is an operational-transparency signal — and a hard requirement for any agent that plans its own throughput.

Documented rate limits and quota policies.

Nvidia Nim Rate Limits

0 limits

RATE LIMITS

FinOps 1

Cost, billing, and metering signals let a buyer model the financial operations of an API before it's live. We profile them for the same reason we profile pricing: the money is part of the contract.

Cost, billing, and metering signals for API financial operations.

Features 19

The notable capabilities this provider advertises, captured as structured features so they can be searched and compared instead of read one landing page at a time.

Notable capabilities this provider offers.

OpenAI-compatible REST surface — /v1/chat/completions, /v1/completions, /v1/embeddings, /v1/models, /v1/ranking
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

Scroll within the panel for all 19 ·

Semantic Vocabularies 1

JSON-LD contexts give the data shared meaning across APIs. We profile them because semantics are what let a machine reconcile 'customer' here with 'customer' somewhere else.

JSON-LD contexts and semantic vocabularies used across these APIs.

Nvidia Nim Context

40 classes · 10 properties

JSON-LD

Spectral Rules 1

Governance rulesets we run against this provider's specs — the automated checks behind parts of the score. Profiling them makes the quality bar explicit and re-runnable, not a matter of opinion.

NVIDIA NIM API Rules

6 rules · 5 warnings

SPECTRAL

JSON Schema 2

Standalone JSON Schema definitions describe the data models behind the API. We profile them so the shapes are validatable on their own — useful long after a single request is forgotten.

Standalone JSON Schema definitions for this provider's data models.

NVIDIA NIM Chat Completion

0 properties

JSON SCHEMA

NVIDIA NIM Embedding

0 properties

JSON SCHEMA

Security Posture 3

Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals — the evidence that a provider takes security seriously enough to document it. We profile it because you can't govern what you can't see.

Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals.

Nvidia Nim Authentication

http · 1 scheme

SECURITY

Nvidia Nim Domain Security

TLSv1.3 · HSTS · DMARC

SECURITY

Nvidia Nim Vulnerability Disclosure

disclosure policy published

SECURITY

Agentic Access 1

An x-agentic-access contract marks which operations are safe for an agent to run on its own and which need a human in the loop. It is the difference between an API an agent can use and one it can use safely.

Recommended x-agentic-access execution contracts for AI agents.

Nvidia Nim Agentic Access

16 operations · 11 acting

16 operations · 11 acting

AGENTIC

Resources

Every other property we hold for NVIDIA NIM — documentation, portals, status pages, policies, and corporate surface — grouped by the job it does, following the integrator's arc from getting started to running in production.

Get Started 4

Portal, sign-up, and the first successful call

Company 2

The organization behind the API

← All providers · Data indexed from github.com/api-evangelist/nvidia-nim · machine-readable index on apis.io