Nvidia’s open-model support is a bottleneck strategy, not charity

davidmanheim · x · 2026-07-27

Nvidia funding open models is not philanthropy, but strategy: if you control a bottleneck, you can help commoditize your complements and shape the ecosystem around your hardware.

The thread argues this coalition is closer to an economic cartel than a public protest. It also notes the incentives shift when the hardware owner is integrated with the lab—Google/DeepMind can capture both hardware and model margins, and Microsoft/OpenAI has a more complicated version of the same dynamic.

Related event: Open Source Models Reshape AI Compute Economics: Profits Flow Back to GPU Rents(7 posts)→

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