Nvidia's $250B Leverage: Huang Pushes Open-Weights AI Agenda

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's first X post promotes open-source AI, backed by billions in investments and potential deals with OpenAI and Anthropic.

This article was drafted with AI assistance from multiple sources and was reviewed and approved by a human editor before publication.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has thrown his weight behind open-source AI, publishing his first-ever post on X (formerly Twitter) on July 27, 2026. The post promoted an open letter, initially signed by Nvidia, Meta, Microsoft, IBM, and Dell, which argues that open models "strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty." Huang also wrote: "The world needs both frontier closed models and frontier open models."

The letter has since gained additional signatories, including OpenAI and SpaceXAI. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman quoted Huang's post and reiterated his support: "I want the US to win in AI both in open source and proprietary models, and I am glad to see this."

Nvidia's advocacy comes with significant financial leverage. Over the past year, the company has announced billions of dollars in investments in AI startups, including OpenAI and Anthropic, often tied to infrastructure deployments. OpenAI has $30 billion in funding capital riding on Nvidia, while Anthropic has $10 billion. The Wall Street Journal reported on July 26 that Nvidia may provide a $250 billion backstop to help OpenAI lease space from a planned $10 billion datacenter that Softbank is building in Ohio. Additionally, OpenAI is close to landing a $500 billion data center deal in Piketon, Ohio, with backing from Nvidia; the groundbreaking ceremony took place in March 2026.

Despite the enthusiasm, actual open model releases remain to be seen. OpenAI released GPT-OSS last year, with models at 20 and 120 billion parameters, which were among the US's most capable open models at the time. GPT-OSS celebrates its first birthday next month. Meta's Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang confirmed last week that Meta would get back into the open model race, after Llama 4 failed to impress in 2025 and the company pivoted to proprietary models. SpaceXAI earlier committed to releasing older model weights but hasn't followed through; its most recent open-weights model on Hugging Face is Grok 2, while Grok 5 rolled out to the public earlier this month.