diff --git a/megatron/training/arguments.py b/megatron/training/arguments.py
index 25f0d0d06d0..2cb2a2a0e6a 100644
--- a/megatron/training/arguments.py
+++ b/megatron/training/arguments.py
@@ -2477,7 +2477,7 @@ def _add_distributed_args(parser):
     group.add_argument('--create-all-gather-group', action='store_true',
                    help='Create a separate process group for all-gather operations '
                    'to overlap reduce-scatter and all-gather operations.')
-    group.add_argument('--data-parallel-sharding-strategy', type=str, default='no_shard',
+    group.add_argument('--data-parallel-sharding-strategy', type=str, default='optim_grads_params',
                        choices=['no_shard', 'optim', 'optim_grads', 'optim_grads_params'],
                        help='Sharding strategy of data parallelism.')
     group.add_argument('--outer-dp-sharding-strategy', type=str, default='no_shard',