Open-Weight AI Draws Billion-Dollar Bids Despite Single-Digit Adoption

Nvidia is pursuing a $13 billion Hugging Face acquisition and a $6 billion Poolside deal; Stripe bought OpenRouter for over $7 billion in mid-August 2026. Yet Ramp data shows only ~6% of companies use open-weight models, and Jellyfish finds ~2% of engineers do. Worth flagging: acquirers are paying distribution-layer prices for adoption that has not materialized.