On June 29th, 2026, NVIDIA — the company whose chips almost all artificial intelligence runs on — teamed up with Palantir and started giving NVIDIA's own AI models away for free.
There's a name for the move: commoditize your complement. The AI economy has three layers — chips at the bottom, models in the middle, applications on top. The middle layer wants to meter every question you ask. The floor and the ceiling both want the opposite, so they went after it together.
Then on July 24th, Jensen Huang published an open-weights letter as his first-ever post on X. Twenty-five companies signed the first day. Within a week, more than two hundred had — including OpenAI. One frontier lab didn't sign.
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