00:00NVIDIA agreed in early September to buy Hugging Face, the platform where AI models gather.
00:06AMD announced on September 28th that it would buy the AI Research Lab, World Labs.
00:11Less than a month apart, the AI chip leader and its challenger both moved to buy something that isn't a
00:17chip.
00:18Both justified the deals with the same word, openness.
00:22Why do chip companies keep talking about it?
00:25Here's what's confirmed and what isn't.
00:27Stay for two signals to watch.
00:30They bought different things.
00:32Hugging Face is an online marketplace where developers download AI models and tools.
00:37NVIDIA agreed to pay about $12.9 billion, including employee retention pay, with closing expected in the first half of
00:452027.
00:47World Labs researches models that help AI understand the 3D real world, so AMD can build chips and software to
00:54match where AI is heading.
00:55AMD agreed to pay about $8.2 billion, all in its own stock, aiming to close within the year.
01:02Both deals still need regulatory approval.
01:05Chip companies are moving deeper into AI models.
01:09NVIDIA already releases its own open models.
01:12Both talked of openness.
01:14NVIDIA's filing promised to keep Hugging Face open and keep supporting competitors' chips.
01:20AMD CEO Lisa Su wrote that the company would strengthen the open AI ecosystem, and Fei-Fei Li wrote that
01:27they would deliver the best open models and platforms.
01:30But it's not the same openness.
01:33NVIDIA promises a neutral marketplace.
01:36AMD points to releasing models.
01:38So why openness?
01:40NVIDIA's filing offers a hint.
01:42More demand for open source models means more use of NVIDIA products.
01:47Since NVIDIA sells the most GPUs for running those models, it has, in effect, written that openness may serve its
01:54own interest.
01:55For AMD, nothing confirms why, so it's unconfirmed whether the two moved for the same reason.
02:01That asymmetry is all we can confirm for now.
02:04Questions remain.
02:05Hugging Face is used by AMD, Amazon, and Google, too.
02:10So there are concerns a chip company owner could tilt it toward its own chips.
02:14NVIDIA has a precedent.
02:16It promised customer neutrality when it agreed to buy ARM for $40 billion in 2020.
02:21But the deal collapsed in 2022 amid regulator opposition.
02:26There's no basis to expect the same now.
02:28World Labs is a lab, not a marketplace.
02:31So the question is whether its models are actually released and usable outside AMD chips.
02:37So watch operations, not words.
02:40Two things.
02:41First, Hugging Face.
02:43Whether support for other companies' chips continues during the review and after.
02:48Second, AMD.
02:50How many shares it actually issues at closing, which shows how much existing shareholders' stakes shrink,
02:56and on what terms World Labs' models are released, which shows how far its openness goes.
03:02To sum up, the AI chip race no longer ends with who builds the better chip.
03:07It's widening to who secures the models and ecosystem that run on those chips.
03:12NVIDIA is taking a platform where models gather.
03:16AMD, an organization that researches future models.
03:20How much this turns into market share or chip sales is unknown, but one signal is clear.
03:26Judge AI chip companies by their models and ecosystem, not only chip performance.
03:31That's all for this video.
03:33Thanks for watching.
