In March, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang spent much of Nvidia’s developers conference positioning Nvidia’s chips as the perfect infrastructure for open-source tools, and last month, Huang created an X-née-Twitter account seemingly for the sole purpose of publicly praising the democratizing power of open-source AI. The flow of money away from powerful models also drains potential capital that closed-model makers like OpenAI, Google and Anthropic could use (and are already using) to craft in-house chips and reduce their reliance on Nvidia. Global spending on AI inference (or the actual usage of AI models) is expected to reach $23.3 billion this year, according to a Gartner report published Monday.