@nvidia is now the leading company in the number of open-source AI repositories on @huggingface. This chart tracks major Hugging Face repositories - models, datasets and spaces - over the past 12 months. A year ago, NVIDIA was one of several large contributors. It has since pulled away, adding more than 500 repositories, ahead of Alibaba Cloud, Hugging Face and Tencent since September 2025. These include its own Nemotron model family, Cosmos world models and GR00T data and models for robotics, as well as widely used robotics datasets and optimized versions of other models. This reflects a broader strategy recently articulated by @JensenHuang, who has increasingly positioned open models as central to NVIDIA’s role in AI. This massive acceleration is part of a broader shift in the AI ecosystem. Large technology companies are becoming central players in open-source AI. Leading figures such as @ylecun have long argued that open models could become a form of shared infrastructure, allowing companies, countries and researchers to build without depending entirely on a handful of proprietary models. What very few saw coming, even a year ago, was how quickly that view would become mainstream. The recent open letter signed by NVIDIA, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and OpenAI and dozens of other leading AI organizations made the case explicitly - the AI ecosystem needs a strong open frontier. In 2026, open-source has moved to the very core of the AI ecosystem by pretty much every metric. Usage is perhaps the clearest signal. On OpenRouter, open models accounted for roughly a quarter of routed tokens through much of 2025. They crossed 50% in spring 2026 and have held a majority since May - meaning that, on the platform, more tokens now flow through open models than closed ones. At the same time, the performance gap with proprietary models has collapsed from years to just a few months. On most benchmarks, the best open-weight models score similar to the best closed-source ones. The leading open-source models are now Kimi K3, GLM 5.3, Qwen 3.8 Max and DeepSeek v4 Pro. Qwen and DeepSeek also lead in downloads on Hugging Face, while models from Z.AI, Tencent, Xiaomi and NVIDIA are among the most used on OpenRouter. The center of gravity of open-source AI is clearly shifting, with Chinese labs - as we have noted for some time - now playing a defining role in both the technological frontier and global adoption. The more capable and accessible the open ecosystem becomes, the easier it is for companies to build agents, robots and specialized AI systems. That opens new possibilities for where value is created, who gets to participate in the AI economy, and how countries and companies think about technological sovereignty. *Note: We consider only repositories published by companies, with at least 500 downloads and 10 likes for spaces. Major non-company publishers, such as the nonprofit Allen Institute for AI (AI2), are therefore excluded.