By Kif Leswing
Publication Date: 2026-08-11 13:00:00
Jensen Huang, chief executive officer of Nvidia Corp., speaks next to a BlueField-4 STX Storage tray, from left, Vera CPU compute tray, and Spectrum-X Ethernet Photonics Switch System while holding a Spectrum-X Ethernet Photonics chip during a keynote address at the Nvidia GTC conference in San Jose, California, US, on Monday, March 16, 2026.
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In late July, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang posted on X for the first time to defend open-source models in artificial intelligence, inserting himself into a debate that was raging across the industry.
Less than three weeks later, Nvidia is releasing Nemotron 3.5 Lightning, which the company says is “lightweight” and can run on a single graphics processing unit on a PC. It’s Nvidia’s first open-source model since Huang joined most of his tech peers in urging the U.S. government to support open models while “avoiding premature restrictions” that could push innovation overseas.
The new Nemotron offering is free for companies to download, use and modify without getting permission or paying Nvidia.
For Nvidia, open-source AI is a boon for chip sales, because the models still need to run on GPUs, and the lower prices can serve to boost usage over proprietary models from the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic.
“Free AI should be great for hardware,” Huang told Axios in an interview last month. “Free AI should be great for chips.”
Huang jumped headfirst into a debate that had sprung up in Washington following the…
