They want LEVERAGE.

They can't ride the hyperscaler gravy train forever; at some point between Google, AMD, and Apple NVIDIA is going to lose its monopoly on serving large customers.

At that point, it would be useful if a few open models existed which were only a couple of months behind the frontier.

But it's very important that the open models never be TOO good, because the AI companies are buying compute on the assumption that their software will add value. If it becomes a commodity business with frontier open models, NVIDIA won't be able to get away with such a crazy markup.