월스트리트 애널리스트와 투자자들은 차세대 컴퓨팅 접근의 민주화를 통해 OpenAI와 Anthropic의 경쟁 구도를 재편할 수 있는 중요한 전환점으로 Nvidia-Hugging Face 간의 전략적 파트너십을 주목하고 있다.

“Big Short” investor Michael Burry has dismissed concerns surrounding Nvidia’s $12.93 billion acquisition of Hugging Face, calling the transaction a “no-brainer.” As analysts evaluate the deal’s potential to establish a stronger counterweight to OpenAI and Anthropic, Nvidia’s stock rose 1% overnight heading into Friday, following a 2% jump in the previous session and a 2% gain for the week.

Speaking on Substack, Burry emphasized that valuation metrics are secondary to strategic positioning. “It is a no-brainer for them. Good move,” he wrote. “Price doesn’t matter for them at this point. The company is valuable, and today it doesn’t matter how valuable.” Hugging Face operates as a central hub for the open-source AI community, serving over 18 million developers, researchers, and creators. Its platform hosts more than three million models, 500,000 datasets, and one million applications, with over 200,000 companies utilizing it to discover, customize, and deploy AI solutions.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang stated that the acquisition will scale the platform while broadening access to artificial intelligence. “Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty,” Huang said. “They allow every developer, startup, university, industry and country to build with, customize and benefit from AI.” Hugging Face CEO Clement Delangue noted that open-source AI has reached “an inflection point” but requires additional compute, support, and collaboration to scale effectively. Under the agreement, Hugging Face will retain its brand and remain fully open to models, clouds, frameworks, and processors across the industry; Nvidia hardware will not be required to build or deploy through the platform. Both companies aim to make open source the default methodology for building AI and enable 100 million builders to “own their intelligence rather than rent it.”

Financial and industry analysts have framed the acquisition as both an offensive and defensive maneuver. Morningstar described it as a “wise offensive” and defensive move that solidifies Nvidia’s position in open-source AI. The firm anticipates a coexistence of open and closed models, with open-source systems managing high-volume, cost-sensitive workloads while premium offerings like Anthropic’s Claude handle mission-critical tasks. Crucially, Hugging Face provides Nvidia with a strategic hedge should OpenAI, Anthropic, and hyperscalers increasingly adopt internally designed chips. In such a scenario, Morningstar projects Nvidia could emerge with “more competitive models.” The primary risk remains developer attrition if Nvidia appears to favor its own Nemotron models or proprietary hardware, though the company has pledged to maintain platform independence and compute agnosticism. Patrick Moorhead, chief analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, echoed this assessment, labeling the deal a “TAM play” and a strategic hedge that positions Nvidia at the center of developers’ daily workflows while advancing its “continued march to deliver the entire solution.”

Billionaire investor Chamath Palihapitiya characterized the acquisition as “very consequential and important,” noting that AI is shifting toward “ultra capable and ultra cheap sources of intelligence tokens.” He argued the deal grants Nvidia another advantage as hyperscalers deepen their investments in custom silicon and the chipmaker expands higher up the AI stack. Investor Jason Calacanis went further, identifying Nvidia as the “number-one competitor to OpenAI and Anthropic” for AI tokens and enterprise compute.

The transaction has drawn widespread endorsement across the technology sector. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella expects the open-model ecosystem to “flourish and grow,” while Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai stated the acquisition would “strengthen the open model ecosystem.” The CEO of Tesla and SpaceX also congratulated Huang on the deal. In the cybersecurity space, CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz called the acquisition “great news for the industry,” adding, “Open models put frontier AI in the hands of every builder and every defender.” Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora observed that the high cost of frontier models is driving enterprise discussions toward open source, reaffirming his belief in “different horses for different courses.” Former White House AI adviser David Sacks emphasized that decentralized access is essential to preventing “an unsafe and dystopian future” in which advanced AI is monopolized by a handful of corporations.

Despite institutional and executive backing, retail trader sentiment on Stocktwits shifted from ‘neutral’ to ‘bearish’ for NVDA amid a 26% decline in 24-hour message volumes. One bullish contributor warned, “$NVDA Hugging face purchase will result in some lawsuits or FTC review. Some will call it anti competitive. Not sure myself. Bullish but there will be more news to come.” Another user remarked, “That makes this less about adding another revenue stream and more about controlling another doorway into the AI ecosystem.” Regardless of short-term sentiment fluctuations, NVDA stock has gained 24% year to date, cementing its status as the best-performing member of the “Magnificent Seven.”