Venture capitalist Jason Calacanis argued that Nvidia Corp (NASDAQ:NVDA) is moving beyond its role as the world’s leading AI chipmaker and is positioning itself to compete more directly with companies like OpenAI and Anthropic through its growing portfolio of open-weight AI models.
Jason Calacanis Says Nvidia Is Expanding Beyond Chips With Nemotron
Last week, during an episode of the All-In Podcast, venture capitalist Calacanis said Nvidia is preparing to “own the whole stack” by pairing its dominant AI hardware business with increasingly capable open-weight large language models.
“Nvidia is taking the gloves off with its open source model. They will own the whole stack,” Calacanis said.
He predicted that Nvidia’s open-weight models could become good enough for many everyday AI use cases, adding, “You will not be able to tell the difference between Jensen Huang’s open source LLM and Claude for 95% of your searches, I guarantee you.”
Calacanis also suggested Nvidia had previously kept its AI model ambitions relatively quiet because some of its largest customers, including OpenAI and Anthropic, were developing frontier models using Nvidia’s chips.
“His top customers … were very concerned, from what I understand, about the fact that Nvidia had made so much progress on their open source model,” he said.
Why Calacanis Believes Nvidia Is ‘Taking The Gloves Off’
According to Calacanis, the competitive landscape has shifted as major AI developers pursue alternatives to Nvidia’s ecosystem, citing OpenAI’s reported custom AI chip efforts, Anthropic’s chip partnerships, Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.’s (NASDAQ:AMD) growing AI presence and Elon Musk’s push to build more of xAI’s infrastructure in-house.
Nvidia has been investing heavily in its Nemotron family of open-weight models, which are designed for enterprise applications including reasoning, retrieval-augmented generation and multimodal AI.
Last month, Nvidia and Palantir Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ:PLTR) announced a partnership to deploy Nemotron-powered AI systems in sovereign and classified environments.
This allows government agencies and critical infrastructure operators to train and run AI models while retaining control over sensitive data and intellectual property.
Price Action: Nvidia shares closed 1.39% lower at $194.83 on Thursday and edged up 0.09% to $195.00 in Monday’s premarket trading, according to Benzinga Pro.
According to Benzinga Edge Rankings, Nvidia scores in the 98th percentile for Growth, reflecting strong long-term performance despite weakness over the short and medium term.
Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors.
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