Open-Weight Model Companies Have Become the Valley's Most Contested Acquisition Category

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TechCrunch tallies the pattern: Nvidia's reported ~$13B move on Hugging Face, its $6B agreement with open-weight model builder Poolside, and Stripe's reported $7B+ acquisition of OpenRouter. The thesis is that the distribution and gateway layer for models nobody owns is worth more than the models themselves, which is why capital is flowing into businesses that give weights away. For builders, it means the neutral-broker layer they route through is being bought by parties with their own model interests.