It's a clever move if that's what they're doing. They're restricted in China, and are likely to face stiff competition from Chinese chipmakers in the coming years. Acquiring the largest repository of trainable models and ensuring they run better on Nvidia hardware is probably one of the few moves they have for keeping ahead of the competition. I mean, it would be terrible for the consumer, but it does make me think that NVDA is a decent investment.
Well now that they own it, they can do whatever they like. They don't necessarily have to be optimizing the models for their hardware, they could just setup preferential pipelines to funnel users to their ecosystem. That seems fairly prudent given the challenges coming their way.
