NVIDIA gives away powerful AI for free — and makes more money than its competitors
NVIDIA continues to reshape the artificial intelligence market. On June 4, 2026, it released the Nemotron 3 Ultra — the largest open-source AI model in the Nemotron 3 lineup. The weights, training data, and training methodologies were made publicly available under a permissive license. This is not merely a gesture of goodwill — it is a calculated strategy that generates more profit for the company than closed competitors earn from paid access.
Architecture: A Hybrid of Speed and Accuracy
The Nemotron 3 Ultra is not a standard "scaled-up transformer." It is based on a hybrid architecture combining three approaches: Mamba-2 layers, Attention mechanisms, and Latent Mixture of Experts (Latent MoE).
Mamba-2 layers process long texts quickly and efficiently — their costs grow linearly, rather than exponentially like standard attention. Attention layers, in turn, accurately retain large volumes of text in memory. Latent MoE compresses data before passing it to "specialists" within the model, allowing each expert to work narrowly and precisely without unnecessary computations.
The result: the model has approximately 550 billion parameters, but only about 55 billion are activated for processing each token. This allows it to reason like a massive system while behaving cost-wise like a compact one. With a context window of 1 million tokens and a speed exceeding 300 tokens per second, this yields five to six times greater throughput and roughly 30% lower task costs compared to alternatives.
Strategy: The Ecosystem is More Valuable Than the Model
The main value of the release is not the model itself, but the ecosystem that NVIDIA is building around its hardware. The logic is simple: whoever runs Nemotron almost certainly does so on NVIDIA graphics cards, fine-tunes it using its software tools, and deploys it on its software. Openness here is not charity, but a way to bring developers back to purchasing the company's hardware.
With a market capitalization exceeding $5 trillion, training the Nemotron 3 Ultra, which likely cost hundreds of millions of dollars, is a nearly negligible expense for NVIDIA. Graphics card sales more than cover the research, so the company can give away the model for free and still earn more than closed competitors charge for paid access.
The release gains additional weight from the political context. An open American model can be inspected, modified, and run on one's own servers — making it attractive for countries building independent national AI, from Europe to Southeast Asia. Such a model cannot be remotely disabled, and this is especially valuable given recent restrictions surrounding closed models.
Limitations and Prospects
Despite its advantages, the Nemotron 3 Ultra is not the smartest model on the market. In the independent Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index ranking, it scored 48 points — the best result among open US models, but globally it trails leaders like Kimi K2.6 (54 points) and DeepSeek. According to analysts, open models lag behind closed ones by three to seven months.
But this gap matters less and less if an open model is simply sufficient for real-world tasks. A bank deploying the Nemotron 3 Ultra to process loans on its own servers does not need flagship-level intelligence — it needs a model that can be fine-tuned on private data, kept within a secure perimeter, and not expose confidential information to outsiders.
NVIDIA's bet on efficiency, rather than test records, may prove more farsighted. With mass AI adoption, the cost of running a model takes center stage, and one that is nearly as smart but five times cheaper wins in real-world deployment. Analysts expect the open ecosystem to only strengthen: NVIDIA has the resources, motivation, and distribution channels to release increasingly powerful open models faster than any other company.
Expert Opinion: In the world of cryptocurrencies and decentralized technologies, open AI models are the new "gold standard." NVIDIA is not just giving away a tool; it is creating infrastructure that could become the foundation for autonomous agents and a new generation of smart contracts. Those integrating Nemotron now gain not only performance but also a strategic advantage in the race for data control.