GoKawiilBig quote: Jensen Huang just spent a week watching his company's valuation get hit by the threat of a Chinese open-weight model. His response was to go on the record defending it. Speaking to Axios in Fort Worth, Texas, at the opening of a new phase of the Wistron plant that builds Nvidia's AI infrastructure, the Nvidia CEO said American companies should "absolutely" be free to run Chinese models. "These Chinese models are excellent," he said. "Open-source models that are excellent should be used." Asked whether China could displace American labs, he was blunt: "Zero possibility."
Update (July 24): Jensen Huang has taken his open-model campaign to X, creating an account and using his first post to share an industry letter signed by Nvidia and two dozen other technology companies, including Microsoft, Meta, Mozilla, Hugging Face, and Palantir.
The coalition is urging US policymakers to keep advanced model weights accessible, expand computing resources for researchers and startups, and resist early restrictions that could weaken competition or push development overseas.
It is a natural extension of Huang's argument that widely available models improve security, lower costs, and spread AI adoption – while also creating more demand for the chips and data centers Nvidia sells.
– Jensen Huang (@JensenHuang) July 24, 2026
The timing is what makes it interesting. Moonshot AI released Kimi K3 on July 16. Independent evaluators put it third on Artificial Analysis' Intelligence Index, only behind Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 and OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol, and first on Arena's blind Frontend Code Arena board.
The market took it about as well as it took DeepSeek. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index fell 12.5% in a week, its worst stretch in 15 months. Taiwan's benchmark dropped more than 6%, Japan closed down 4%, and Chinese AI stocks actually got hit harder than American ones, with Zhipu down as much as 30% in Hong Kong and MiniMax off 16%.
"The market misunderstood the impact of DeepSeek the first time," Huang told Axios, adding that Wall Street has "misunderstood the impact of Kimi again this time."
His pitch is one Nvidia has made before, delivered without much subtlety this time: "Free AI should be great for hardware. Free AI should be great for chips. Free AI should be great for data centers." The logic is that as cheap, capable models get used more, not less, more usage means more chips running somewhere. He also argued open models don't cannibalize OpenAI and Anthropic, but they give people a free first taste, and plenty of those people end up paying for something faster and more reliable.
Bloomberg's analysis of K3 noted that where DeepSeek's story was about cheaper training, Moonshot's is about a much larger model that leans harder on memory infrastructure.
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