Nvidia is spending big to build one of the world's most powerful open-source AI models, a direct shot at Chinese rivals and at closed U.S. players like OpenAI and Anthropic.

• Nvidia is paying $6 billion to license technology from AI startup Poolside, plus $1 billion for a stake in it.
• More than 100 Poolside engineers, though not its founders, are moving to Nvidia to work on its Nemotron open-source models.
• The target is China's cheap open models like DeepSeek and Kimi, which companies and governments worldwide have been adopting.
• Open models are cheaper to run and easier to customize, so this also squeezes OpenAI and Anthropic, which keep their models closed.
• Nvidia's CEO Jensen Huang has long backed open source, while most of the U.S. AI industry went the other way.

Outlook: Expect Nvidia to push out bigger open models over the coming months as the U.S.–China AI race shifts toward who gives their technology away.