Nvidia is moving beyond just selling GPUs to become a platform company. By proactively partnering with smaller rivals like D-Matrix, it ensures its own hardware remains central to complex AI systems. This "coopetition" strategy aims to maintain ecosystem dominance even as diverse chip architectures emerge, countering the narrative that Nvidia only seeks to eliminate competition.

NVIDIA is moving "up the stack" from chips to an AI agent software platform to diversify its business and create a new moat beyond its CUDA system. By courting enterprise partners, NVIDIA aims to maintain infrastructure dominance even if AI labs succeed with their own custom silicon, reducing reliance on NVIDIA GPUs.

NVIDIA possesses a powerful strategic weapon: the ability to release a frontier-level open-source model. This could undermine the business case for customers developing their own custom ASICs by commoditizing the model layer, thus reinforcing NVIDIA's dominance in the hardware ecosystem.

The letter signed by Meta and NVIDIA isn't just about innovation; it's a strategic move to prevent closed-source leaders like OpenAI from cornering the market. Signatories have a vested economic interest in ensuring an open-weight ecosystem thrives, preventing all customer revenue from flowing to proprietary models.

Nvidia is heavily investing in its own open-source models like Nemo Tron. This strategy ensures that as the open-source ecosystem grows, demand for its hardware also grows, positioning Nvidia's chips as the default platform and reducing reliance on closed-source model providers who act as intermediaries.

Jensen Huang strategically allocates GPUs to NeoClouds and new AI labs to prevent a world dominated by a few hyperscalers building their own custom chips (like TPUs). This ensures a diverse customer base and prevents NVIDIA's core products from being commoditized by a handful of powerful buyers.

Unlike other tech giants, NVIDIA's funding of open-source models directly drives its primary revenue source. Every successful open-source model, regardless of who trains or uses it, ultimately runs on NVIDIA hardware, making them the "house" that always wins.

Contrary to past momentum, the most advanced AI startups are increasingly adopting and fine-tuning open-source models. This shift is driven by the need for cost-effective speed and deep customization as their workloads mature and scale.

By building a massive coalition for an open letter supporting open-source AI, NVIDIA created a situation where not signing was a public statement. Anthropic's absence confirmed their differing position without them needing to issue a direct statement, revealing a key dividing line in Silicon Valley.