Huang Resignation Leaves Nvidia's $19 Billion Open Source Bet in Limbo

By Sophie Lindqvist

Nvidia's $13 billion acquisition of Hugging Face sits unsigned, days after CEO Jensen Huang resigned Thursday over an admitted affair with an alleged Chinese spy. The deal, the largest open source bet in the company's history, now awaits a decision from interim CEO Colette Kress. She has said nothing public about it.

That silence is the story. Nvidia built its open source posture on one man's conviction. Nobody knows whether the structure survives him.

Why does Huang's exit matter for open source?

Huang framed open models as good for safety, innovation, diffusion and sovereignty. The argument also served commerce. Frontier labs such as Google and OpenAI increasingly build their own silicon, cutting their reliance on Nvidia. Supporting open models let Nvidia diversify its customer base toward nation-states, enterprises and any organization wanting to own its models.

More players training, fine-tuning and running models means more GPUs sold. Open source was not a charity project. It was a hedge against customer concentration.

What happens to the pending deals?

Two commitments remain open questions.

• The Hugging Face acquisition, valued at $13 billion, is not finalized. CEO Clem Delangue posted on X that the company would keep fighting for open source, "whatever happens next."
• Nvidia agreed to pay $6 billion for a non-exclusive license to Poolside's open AI coding technology.

Neither figure is small. Together they approach $19 billion in exposure to an ecosystem whose chief patron just left the building. Kress has not stated her position on either transaction, and founder-driven priorities tend to get downgraded when leadership changes.

What did Huang actually build?

Inside Nvidia, Huang pushed the Nemotron family of open-weight models. These target long-running agentic AI systems and reasoning workloads, and compete with closed frontier models. He also backed startups that make American open models more competitive, including Reflection AI and Thinking Machines Lab.

These are products and investments, not promises. They exist. Whether they receive continued funding and roadmap priority under new leadership is unknown.

How does this change the Washington fight?

Huang was the most prominent counterweight to closed-model providers. Anthropic and OpenAI have pushed for greater restrictions on advanced AI models on safety grounds, and both reportedly appealed directly to Washington after allegations that Chinese AI labs stole their intellectual property.

Earlier this year, Huang organized an open letter urging the U.S. government not to over-restrict open-weight models. Twenty-five companies signed it, including Microsoft, Meta, IBM and Palantir. Many open-weight models come from China, which complicated the politics even before this week.

The scandal complicates them further. Huang's relationship with Alice Huang, a Megaspeed executive identified as an alleged spy, puts renewed scrutiny on his efforts to loosen chip export controls on China. Critics will now ask whether those lobbying positions served national interests or something else. The source provides no evidence of a connection, but the question will be asked regardless.

His exit could strengthen advocates for tougher restrictions on Chinese AI companies. That prospect worries open source community members. Restrictions on Chinese open-weight models could kneecap competition for American firms, the most powerful of which keep their models closed.

Is open source still central to Nvidia?

Yes, and the numbers say so. Nvidia's largest customers are designing their own chips. Google and OpenAI lead that shift. Nvidia therefore has a structural incentive to cultivate a broad ecosystem of smaller AI developers. The strategy does not depend on Huang's idealism. It depends on arithmetic.

Huang may be gone, but Nvidia still needs an open AI ecosystem. Whether that commitment survives without the man who made it a priority, and whether Kress signs off on $19 billion in open source commitments, will define the company's next chapter. TechCrunch has reached out to Nvidia for comment. No answer had arrived at publication.