NVIDIA is giving away powerful AI for free — and making more money than its competitors
On June 4, 2026, NVIDIA released its largest open-source AI model — Nemotron 3 Ultra. This is not just another release: the model weights, training data, and training methodologies were made publicly available under a free license. The model is designed for long-term autonomous agent operation and complex reasoning.
Unlike closed flagship models like ChatGPT or Claude, Nemotron 3 Ultra can be downloaded, fine-tuned on your own data, and run on your own infrastructure. The focus here is not on maximum intelligence, but on openness, efficiency, and control over the model.
What Makes the Model Architecture Unique
Nemotron 3 Ultra is not just a "scaled-up transformer." It is based on a hybrid architecture consisting of three different approaches: Mamba-2 layers, Attention layers, and a Latent Mixture of Experts (Latent MoE). This is a mechanism that directs each request only to the necessary "specialists" within the model.
Mamba-2 layers process long texts quickly and efficiently: costs grow linearly with length, rather than exponentially as with a standard attention mechanism. Attention layers, in turn, accurately retain large volumes of text in memory. And Latent MoE compresses data before passing it to the experts, allowing each expert to work narrowly and precisely without requiring additional computation.
The model has approximately 550 billion parameters in total, but only about 55 billion are activated for processing each token. This allows it to think like a massive system while behaving like a much more compact one in terms of cost. Combined with a context window of 1 million tokens and a speed of over 300 tokens per second, this results in five to six times greater throughput and roughly 30% lower task costs.
NVIDIA's Strategy: Betting on the Ecosystem
The main value of the release, according to industry analysts, lies not in the model itself, but in the ecosystem that NVIDIA is building around its hardware. The logic is simple: whoever runs Nemotron is almost certainly doing so on NVIDIA GPUs, fine-tuning it with its software tools, and deploying it on its software. Openness here is not charity, but a way to bring developers back to purchasing the company's hardware.
NVIDIA can afford this because its financial capabilities are incomparable to the costs of the model itself. With a market capitalization exceeding $5 trillion, training Nemotron 3 Ultra, which likely cost hundreds of millions of dollars, is a nearly negligible expense for the company. GPU sales more than cover the research, so NVIDIA can give the model away for free and still earn more than closed competitors charge for paid access.
The political context adds further weight to the release. An open American model can be inspected, modified, and run on one's own servers — this has made it attractive to countries building independent national AI, from Europe to Southeast Asia. No one can remotely disable such a model, and this is especially valuable in light of recent restrictions surrounding closed models.
Where the Model Falls Short and What's Next
Despite all its advantages, Nemotron 3 Ultra is not the smartest model on the market. In the independent Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, it scored 48 points — the best result among open US models, but globally it lags behind leaders like Kimi K2.6 (54 points) and DeepSeek. Open models, according to analysts, trail closed ones by three to seven months.
But this gap, in my opinion, matters less and less if an open model is simply sufficient for real-world tasks. A bank deploying Nemotron 3 Ultra to process loans on its own servers doesn't need flagship-level intelligence — it needs a model that can be fine-tuned on private data, kept within its own secure perimeter, and not expose confidential information to outsiders.
NVIDIA's bet on efficiency rather than test records may prove more far-sighted. In mass AI adoption, the cost of running a model comes to the forefront, and one that is nearly as smart but five times cheaper wins in real-world operation. 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: For the crypto industry and decentralized projects, open models like Nemotron 3 Ultra are a true gift. They allow for creating custom AI agents without reliance on centralized APIs, which perfectly aligns with the Web3 philosophy. If NVIDIA continues in this vein, we could see an explosive growth in dApps with AI integration based on its open models.