When The Neutral Shelf Gets A Landlord
The way they pulled this off is wild, buckle up. In the same week Stripe nabs OpenRouter, Nvidia moves on Hugging Face, and suddenly the pattern is too clean to ignore. As one observer put it, "everyone on the hunt for the app that will function as hub/broker/search/marketplace for models." That is not a scattering of deals, that is a land grab for the switchboard. Whoever owns the place where models are found, tested and pulled into production owns the default path to production, and defaults are how platforms…