And as a more general point - more major competitors in a domain is very good for everybody except those competitors themselves, who would rather there be as few as possible.
It’s classic commoditize your complement, nobody can replicate the cloud providers, everyone can replicate the models with open weights.
Microsoft and Meta are also-rans at this point. Their best hope of catching up is probably leveraging their infra and open models.
https://windowsforum.com/threads/azure-capacity-crunch-exten...
"AI Product" doesn't necessarily mean "We sell API access to a our models." Ton of companies out there itching to buy a commercial off the shelf product to deliver whatever AI capabilities they need packaged in a nice GUI, with enterprise governance controls, without needing a dev team/team of engineers to integrate it or develop harnesses, etc.
Buy it->have IT click a few buttons in an admin console->Deploy and have it be immediately useful is the play.
The entire justification for the AI buildout, and the valuations of all the major AI labs, is that the service will be priced at some significant fraction of the knowledge work it's replacing. If you think it will become commoditized in the future, you are saying these companies are significantly overvalued at present.
I do lean toward them being significantly overvalued at present. OpenAI & Anthropic's valuations assume high margin product pricing on raw intelligence itself. Even if assume the labs will start charging value-based pricing, enterprise buyers will pay that pricing to whoever saves them engineering hours to make any cheap model work inside their compliance boundary, no guarantee that's going to be OpenAI or Anthropic.
Microsoft wins either way, proprietary, expensive models or cheap commoditized inference, because they monetize the workflow on top, not the raw intelligence. I also happen to think it's everything "on top" where a lot of value lives. Plenty of non-tech enterprises and companies out there itching for a ClickOps style AI product, especially if they don't have an engineering team, that they can buy off the shelf, meets all the compliance checkboxes, and does what they need without having to build the agents and harnesses themselves with the APIs.
So Nvidia benefits from more inference providers running many Chinese models that they otherwise would not have been able to service.
If I were cynical, I'd say it isn't helped by the current US administration.
The other thing that comes to mind is they want to avoid the government from banning open models as has been suggested by some of the closed models providers.