엔비디아, 60억달러 들여 ‘AI개발사’ 기술 제휴…자체 모델 승부수

NVIDIA has signed a $6 billion (8.4 trillion won) technical license agreement with artificial intelligence (AI) startup FullSight to bolster its open-weight model development efforts. This move comes amid a surge in popularity of open-source models originating from China. By acquiring FullSight's technology and most of its engineers, NVIDIA plans to accelerate its own open-weight model development project called "NeMoTron."

Over 100 FullSight employees will join NVIDIA to work on improving their own open-weight model, "NemoTron." FullSight, founded in 2023 by Jason Warner, former Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of the code-sharing platform GitHub, has been developing open-weight models such as "Raguna." In addition to competing in the AI semiconductor market, NVIDIA recently launched the NeMoTron3 product and is currently developing the large-scale model "NemoTron4," which is believed to have over 1 trillion parameters.

This strategic move aims to counter the rapid growth of Chinese open-weight models, which are gaining popularity due to their ability to rival advanced closed-source models from the United States while also offering lower operating costs. The formation of a supportive ecosystem around Chinese models and their efficient performance on hardware from competitors like Huawei poses a potential threat to NVIDIA's dominance in the GPU market.

However, if NVIDIA successfully develops a competitive open-weight model and optimizes it in conjunction with its graphics processing units (GPUs), it could strengthen its hardware demand.