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. 

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.