Jensen Huang’s exit puts Nvidia’s support for open source in question

The open source community just lost one of its strongest advocates.  Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang resigned Thursday after he admitted to an affair with an alleged Chinese spy, raising concerns about U.S. national security and the motives behind the executive’s support for softer chip export controls on China.  Huang has been a staunch supporter of open source AI, framing the ecosystem as good for safety, innovation, diffusion, and sovereignty.

And as frontier AI labs increasingly move to reduce their reliance on Nvidia and build their own chips, supporting open source is also a good way for the company to diversify its customer base by selling chips to nation-states, enterprises, and any organization that wants to own tits own models. Still, Huang’s resignation raises questions about whether Nvidia will carry on his legacy by continuing to support the open model community.  Jensen no longer being CEO would be very very bad for the open model cause in the US. Huang’s departure also comes as Nvidia has yet to finalize a deal to acquire open source platform Hugging Face for $13 billion. Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue said in a post on X that the company would continue to fight for open source, whatever happens next. Nvidia also agreed to pay $6 billion for a non-exclusive license for open AI coding startup Poolside’s technology.  Within Nvidia, Huang pushed for the development of the Nemotron family of open-weight AI models built for long-running agentic AI systems and reasoning workloads — potential competitors to closed frontier models. Huang also backed companies that would make American open models more competitive, investing in startups like Reflection AI and Thinking Machines Lab. Huang’s influence extended beyond Nvidia’s investments and product roadmap. He also emerged as one of the most prominent voices pushing back against Washington’s efforts to restrict the open AI ecosystem.  Earlier this year, Huang wrote an open letter signed by 25 companies, including Microsoft, Meta, IBM, and Palantir, urging the U.S. government not to over-restrict open-weight AI models, many of which come from China. The impetus for that letter was Washington’s debate over how the U.S. should respond to allegations that Chinese AI labs are stealing intellectual property from American counterparts like Anthropic and OpenAI, both of which have reportedly appealed directly to Washington on the matter, urging stronger protections.  That combination of Huang’s personal visibility and Nvidia’s market power made him the strongest counterweight to arguments from closed-model providers like Anthropic and OpenAI, which have advocated for greater restrictions on advanced AI models due to safety reasons.