NVIDIA has launched the NVIDIA Nemotron Coalition, a new alliance of AI labs and model builders that the company describes as a “first-of-its-kind global collaboration” focused on advancing “open, frontier-level foundation models” through shared “expertise, data and compute.” The announcement was published March 16 as part of the company’s GTC news cycle.
The coalition’s inaugural members are Black Forest Labs, Cursor, LangChain, Mistral AI, Perplexity, Reflection AI, Sarvam and Thinking Machines Lab. NVIDIA said the group will work together to develop an open model trained on NVIDIA DGX Cloud, and that the “first model built by the coalition will underpin the upcoming NVIDIA Nemotron 4 family of open models.”
In the release, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang said,
Open models are the lifeblood of innovation and the engine of global participation in the AI revolution — for students, scientists, startups and entire industries.
He added that the coalition
unites world-class AI labs to develop frontier open models that champion transparency, collaboration and sovereignty.
NVIDIA said the first project will be “a base model codeveloped by Mistral AI and NVIDIA,” with coalition members contributing “data, evaluations and domain expertise” for post-training and continued development. The company also said the model “will be shared with the open ecosystem,” positioning it as a base layer developers and organizations can adapt for “their industries, regions and unique needs.”
The move underscores how strategically important open models have become as companies, developers and governments look for alternatives to relying entirely on closed commercial AI systems. NVIDIA does not explicitly frame the coalition as a competitive response, but the structure of the initiative suggests the chip giant wants to deepen its influence beyond infrastructure and into the model ecosystem itself. That last point is an inference based on the announcement’s positioning, not a direct statement from NVIDIA.
Several coalition members used the release to argue that open models are essential to the next phase of AI development. Arthur Mensch, cofounder and CEO of Mistral AI, said,
Open frontier models are how AI becomes a true platform.
He added,
Together with NVIDIA, we will take a leading role in training and advancing frontier models at scale.
Black Forest Labs cofounder and CEO Robin Rombach said,
We have always been convinced that open models help drive frontier capabilities,
adding that
through coalitions like this one, between independent partners, we can reach the scale needed to accelerate the next generation of state-of-the-art open multimodal models.
Cursor cofounder and CEO Michael Truelle said,
When frontier models are accessible and transparent, developers everywhere can help shape how this technology evolves.
He said Cursor will contribute “real-world performance requirements and evaluation datasets” to improve “the quality and reliability of the base models for developers.”
LangChain cofounder and CEO Harrison Chase said that frontier models “must go beyond raw intelligence to enable reliable tool use, long-horizon reasoning and agent coordination.” He added,
We will build the best agent harness for these models, rigorously evaluate their capabilities and provide comprehensive observability into agent behavior.
Perplexity cofounder and CEO Aravind Srinivas said,
Open models make AI more accessible at scale, giving builders the flexibility to improve performance, reduce costs and push AI applications into everyday use.
Reflection cofounder and CEO Misha Laskin said his company is working to ensure “that the foundation of intelligence remains open — not controlled by a few — and accessible worldwide.”
Sarvam cofounder and CEO Pratyush Kumar said,
AI reaches its full potential when it works in every language and for every community,
while Thinking Machines Lab founder and CEO Mira Murati said her company is “keen to support the Nemotron Coalition’s mission of democratizing frontier AI capabilities.”
For NVIDIA, the coalition is also a message: in the next phase of the AI race, owning the chips may not be enough. Helping shape the open-model layer could prove just as important. Whether Nemotron becomes a meaningful counterweight in the frontier-model market will depend on what the coalition actually ships — and how competitive those open models are once they reach developers.
Image: NVIDIA
