Open-Weight AI Attracts Billion-Dollar Bets Despite Minimal Adoption

Nvidia is pursuing a $13 billion Hugging Face acquisition and a $6 billion Poolside deal; Stripe bought OpenRouter for over $7 billion in August 2026. Yet Ramp data shows only about 6% of companies use open-weight models — AI released with freely downloadable weights — and Jellyfish finds roughly 2% of engineers do. Worth flagging: buyers are paying distribution-scale prices for adoption that has not yet arrived.