diff --git a/sub-packages/bionemo-geneformer/src/bionemo/geneformer/scripts/train_geneformer.py b/sub-packages/bionemo-geneformer/src/bionemo/geneformer/scripts/train_geneformer.py
index 8f7b046a6d..3ebf19f068 100644
--- a/sub-packages/bionemo-geneformer/src/bionemo/geneformer/scripts/train_geneformer.py
+++ b/sub-packages/bionemo-geneformer/src/bionemo/geneformer/scripts/train_geneformer.py
@@ -279,6 +279,7 @@ def main(
         seq_length=seq_length,
         bias_dropout_fusion=False,
         bias_activation_fusion=False,
+        defer_embedding_wgrad_compute=pipeline_model_parallel_size > 1,
         params_dtype=get_autocast_dtype(precision),
         pipeline_dtype=get_autocast_dtype(precision),
         autocast_dtype=get_autocast_dtype(precision),  # setting this speeds things up a lot
diff --git a/sub-packages/bionemo-llm/src/bionemo/llm/model/biobert/model.py b/sub-packages/bionemo-llm/src/bionemo/llm/model/biobert/model.py
index 283a43f73b..68eac670d4 100644
--- a/sub-packages/bionemo-llm/src/bionemo/llm/model/biobert/model.py
+++ b/sub-packages/bionemo-llm/src/bionemo/llm/model/biobert/model.py
@@ -199,7 +199,6 @@ def __init__(  # noqa: D107
 
         # megatron core pipelining currently depends on model type
         self.model_type = ModelType.encoder_or_decoder
-
         # Embeddings.
         if self.pre_process:
             self.register_buffer(
@@ -235,6 +234,21 @@ def __init__(  # noqa: D107
         # Output
         if post_process:
             # TODO: Make sure you are passing in the mpu_vocab_size properly
+            if self.config.defer_embedding_wgrad_compute:
+                # The embedding activation buffer preserves a reference to the input activations
+                # of the final embedding projection layer GEMM. It will hold the activations for
+                # all the micro-batches of a global batch for the last pipeline stage. Once we are
+                # done with all the back props for all the microbatches for the last pipeline stage,
+                # it will be in the pipeline flush stage. During this pipeline flush we use the
+                # input activations stored in embedding activation buffer and gradient outputs
+                # stored in gradient buffer to calculate the weight gradients for the embedding
+                # final linear layer.
+                self.embedding_activation_buffer = []
+                self.grad_output_buffer = []
+            else:
+                self.embedding_activation_buffer = None
+                self.grad_output_buffer = None
+
             self.lm_head = BertLMHead(
                 config.hidden_size,
                 config,
@@ -250,6 +264,8 @@ def __init__(  # noqa: D107
                 skip_bias_add=False,
                 gather_output=not self.parallel_output,
                 skip_weight_param_allocation=pre_process and share_embeddings_and_output_weights,
+                embedding_activation_buffer=self.embedding_activation_buffer,
+                grad_output_buffer=self.grad_output_buffer,
             )
 
             self.binary_head = None
@@ -342,6 +358,7 @@ def forward(
         tokentype_ids: Optional[Tensor] = None,
         lm_labels: Optional[Tensor] = None,
         inference_params: Any | None = None,
+        runtime_gather_output: Optional[bool] = None,
     ) -> BioBertOutput | Tensor:
         """Forward function of BERT model
 
@@ -420,6 +437,7 @@ def forward(
 
         hidden_states_after_lm_head = self.lm_head(hidden_states=hidden_states)
         if not self.skip_logits:
+            # TODO add , runtime_gather_output=runtime_gather_output once supported in ColumnParallelLinear
             logits, _ = self.output_layer(hidden_states_after_lm_head, weight=output_weight)
         else:
             logits = None