How Companies Are Building Their Own Intelligence | Sonya Huang, Sequoia Capital
Sequoia urges portfolio companies to own AI model weights, not rent them from closed providers
“companies want to own their intelligence. They want to own not rent their weights.”— Jensen Huang
Sequoia Capital's Sonya Huang convened ~80 portfolio founders around 'sovereign AI' — the thesis that companies should vertically integrate toward owning their own model weights rather than depending on closed-model APIs for core product intelligence. The session frames this as a rallying call backed by Jensen Huang's public push to keep open-weight models available in the US and Satya Nadella's vocal support. The key nuance: Sequoia is not anti-frontier-API for coding agents or desktop work, but sees proprietary intelligence as too strategically critical to fully outsource.