What NVIDIA announced at GTC 2026 is structurally different from prior open-source corporate patronage. Releasing models under Apache licensing, building the Nemotron Coalition around established open-frontier players like Mistral, and funding NeMo evaluation infrastructure for third-party safety validation [4] — this is vertical integration across the open-source stack, not a donation to it. The companies in the coalition gain compute credibility and distribution; NVIDIA gains a captive open ecosystem whose growth is denominated in GPU-hours. Jensen Huang's GTC framing — …