I see the opposite — NVIDIA is aiming to commoditize the model layer and push open models that are tuned to run on NVIDIA hardware.

NVidia has been expending energy helping improve local models and inference platforms for them targeting NVidia GPUs; good free models that users can run locally rewards Nvidia’s investment in product lines for local inference (DGX, RTX PCs, etc), as well as—given their continued dominance in the space—the premium over competitors of their consumer and workstation GPUs.

Maybe everyone will migrate to Hugging Bay for downloading models via torrent?

File hosting isn’t that hard to replicate though. Even if they start charging people will just set up torrents for the files or lists of mirrors.

Unless I’m missing something, this feels like Nvidia having more money than they know what to do with.

Maybe they're trying to see how big the market actually is before considering shutting it down, maybe or getting lawyers and politicians to try and outlaw or restrict open models if they see a big enough opportunity.