Nvidia has made a fortune on the AI boom. But the flames of opposition to open-weights models — that is, models that anyone can download, modify, and run on their own infrastructure — could change that, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang isn’t waiting to find out.On Friday, a cadre of tech titans wrote an open letter [PDF] offering a counterpoint to the mounting anti-open-weights rhetoric from American companies like Anthropic and OpenAI. Signatories included Meta, Microsoft, IBM, and Dell, but the loudest voice among them was Nvidia.Of course it was. Nvidia has the most to lose.
In his first-ever post to the social network formerly known as Twitter, Huang touted the letter arguing that open models “strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty.”
He added, “The world needs both frontier closed models and frontier open models."Why? Nvidia’s future depends on a healthy and diverse ecosystem of models. As any good arms dealer knows, the best way to guarantee profits is to sell to both sides. But if the US restricts Chinese open-weights models, American customers' options become mediocre US models, or proprietary and increasingly expensive ones from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. Nvidia’s addressable market shrinks and its ability to grow diminishes.What good are all these “AI factories” that Nvidia has helped prop up in that case?As we wrote last week, the US hasn’t invested in open weights models to the same extent as the Chinese model houses. For enterprises unwilling or unable to use proprietary models, models from the likes of DeepSeek, MiniMax, Z.AI, and Moonshot (Kimi) are the only credible alternatives.Thinking Machine Labs’ nearly-billion-parameter Inkling model is the best open weights model the US has to offer, and if benchmarks are to be believed at all, it's not even in the same ballpark as Kimi K3. Huang knows the stakes and the game. If the Trump administration decides to go thermonuclear and sanction Chinese model developers, there’s little he can do about it. He learned that lesson the hard way trying to get his hardware back into China.What Nvidia can do instead is light a fire under American model devs to get their act together and start churning out open weights models that are actually competitive with China.
