US AI leadership will be through an open ecosystem of models, not frontier dominance, Jensen Huang said.
Nvidia is planning to use its $6bn deal with AI start-up Poolside to build open-weight AI models that can rival the likes made by China’s DeepSeek and Moonshot, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported over the weekend.
The reports come after the chipmaking giant promised a combined $7bn investment into the AI start-up, including $1bn in equity at a pre-money valuation of $12bn. This marks a four-fold jump from the company’s 2025 valuation of $3bn.
Founded in 2023, Poolside is behind its Laguna series of open-weight models, small enough to run on a single Nvidia DGX GPU.
Nvidia’s reported plans to make its own open-weight models also places it in direct competition with other US AI companies it backs, including OpenAI and Anthropic, as global businesses compete for dominance in the space.
