NVIDIA's CUDA Playbook Has a Second Act. One for the Agentic Era.
At GTC 2026, NVIDIA unveiled an open-source stack that could redefine the Agentic Era by positioning itself as the infrastructure beneath every enterprise agent, regardless of model or platform.
NVIDIA’s Agent Toolkit, unveiled at GTC 2026, is the company’s bid to become to the agentic era what AWS became to the cloud. The stack is open-source, and its ambition is infrastructural: rather than compete with Anthropic or OpenAI for ownership of the agent, NVIDIA is building the substrate beneath it. When Salesforce ships Agentforce, when SAP deploys Joule, when ServiceNow fields an agentic workflow, each can run on NVIDIA’s runtime, security, and data layer regardless of which model powers the intelligence above. The move arms SaaS incumbents against the model providers, threatening to absorb them, while creating two competing architectures that NVIDIA profits from equally. If model providers win, NVIDIA sells the chips. If incumbents orchestrate on NVIDIA’s stack, NVIDIA owns the hardware beneath and the plumbing between. The Agent Toolkit extends NVIDIA’s lock-in to the agent runtime layer, a new software layer for the agentic era. It is not …