Nvidia’s interest in Hugging Face is a hedge against a future dominated by OpenAI and Anthropic

What does $13 billion buy Nvidia these days? A bigger say in what AI gets built and what it runs on.

Business Insider reported on Wednesday that the chip giant was in talks to acquire Hugging Face, which hosts open-source AI models. That lines up with Nvidia’s strategy as of late, as it has been beating the drum about open-source AI — models that anyone can use and build on.

Open models could stave off a future dominated by giants like OpenAI and Anthropic, both of which create closed, proprietary models. If top AI labs dominate the models being used and build their own chips to run them — as OpenAI is doing with Jalapeño — they could…