Obviously, NVIDIA is trying to own the AI development chain.
Owning HF -- the discovery and distribution channel -- is one thing, but I think the biggest threat vector is the privileged access to HF platform data, that includes HW survey info and model download pattern. This can be a borderline anti-trust case.
There's a small chance this could be signalling a pivot, or at least posturing for a possible future pivot. If they see the mega-datacenter market drying up or slowing down, they may opt for a future in hardware targeted to the individual or smaller teams. In other words, as soon as the VC money for centralized AI dries up, they start selling hardware that doesn't require VC-levels of money to buy.
Also they bought the company which develops the open source slurm scheduler which is the primary and defacto standard HPC scheduler on the market. Bit of a concern to say the least
This brings back memories of the CVS/Aetna merger for me, which ended up going through of course. Hopefully the anti-trust enforcers have some experts in the ML/AI pipeline, but I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't bat an eye at this one. Hope I'm proved wrong though.
Owning HF -- the discovery and distribution channel -- is one thing, but I think the biggest threat vector is the privileged access to HF platform data, that includes HW survey info and model download pattern. This can be a borderline anti-trust case.