Nvidia Wants To Be Your Open Source Model Provider

It seems that chips dominance isn’t enough for Nvidia. The tech giant wants its products to be present at every level of the AI development ecosystem, and its got its eyes on open-source AI models.

Nvidia released its latest Nemotron 3 family of open models on Monday, only months after announcing the first iteration at the company’s GTC event in March. The company press release claims they possess “leading accuracy for building agentic AI applications.”

Open-source AI is often preferred by some users, like firms or governments, for its ability to be customized to the hyper-specific needs of the industry, and for being more private by giving organizations the ability to run the data on their own internal servers instead of the AI company’s.

American tech giants had largely drawn back from the world of open source models as the companies increasingly opted for proprietary options that they can arguably make more money out of. Largely the only exception to this has been Meta which is also reportedly eyeing a shift to proprietary. Even OpenAI, which purports to be an “open” organization unveiled only its first open source model in five years this past August with the release of gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b.

In Silicon Valley’s relative absence, Chinese models have dominated the open source space with high profile releases from DeepSeek and Alibaba. It’s all part of China’s strategy to achieve global AI dominance: an “AI for all” approach would prove broader reach and greater influence on the global industry, especially at a time when Beijing believes that it can produce AI chips powerful enough to become a sizable competitor to Nvidia’s offerings.

From the looks of it, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is worried about this. He has taken almost every opportunity the past few months to urge Washington to take this possibility seriously. At the company’s GTC conference held in D.C. back in October, Huang also warned attendees of China’s open source dominance. He argued that because China is a huge creator of open source software, if Americans retreat completely from China they might risk being “ill-prepared” for when Chinese software “permeates the world.”

Despite not being a big consumer-facing creator of AI models—aside from its AI face generator StyleGAN back in the pre-ChatGPT days—Nvidia seems to be taking matters into its own hands with this China situation. Company executives made it clear that it’s not proprietary models they are trying to compete with. But when it comes to open source, they want to be a bigger player as fellow American tech giants might be conceding and shifting focus.

Nvidia sees Nemotron as a tool to drive further reliance worldwide on its hardware empire. By giving out this open model to developers worldwide, it is hoping to ensure that any new models built will be best aligned with its silicon rather than the rapidly emerging industry in China.

“When we’re the best development platform, again, people are going to choose us, choose our platform, choose our GPU, in order to be able to not just build today, but also build for tomorrow,” Nvidia’s vice president of generative AI software for enterprise Kari Briski said at a press briefing ahead of the release.

Briski believes that a reliable and consistent roadmap of new model releases can help Nvidia achieve this open model edge.

“We recognize that people developing AI applications can’t rely on a model when there’s only been just one model release and no road map,” Briski said, adding that Nvidia will be investing in building that reliability and consistency and is already eyeing new models. “GPT-oss is a fantastic model, OpenAI is a great partner we love them. The last time they put out an open model was over five years ago.”