I think almost the exact opposite. They want open models. Without credible open models, they only have a few customers, and those customers have leverage against nvidia. With open models, they have tons of customers, and nvidia has all the leverage.

Smaller customers are also less able to develop their own hardware and threaten NVidia's business.

Sure but it also means these companies nvidia buys don’t work with AMD and other competitors anymore. There are myriad motivations and it’s not all one or the other but this is a classic component of Silicon Valley acquisition strategies.

They want LEVERAGE.

They can't ride the hyperscaler gravy train forever; at some point between Google, AMD, and Apple NVIDIA is going to lose its monopoly on serving large customers.

At that point, it would be useful if a few open models existed which were only a couple of months behind the frontier.

But it's very important that the open models never be TOO good, because the AI companies are buying compute on the assumption that their software will add value. If it becomes a commodity business with frontier open models, NVIDIA won't be able to get away with such a crazy markup.