Hopefully more cooperating with than competing against. If NVK is good, Linux users will buy more NVIDIA cards. I don't see NVIDIA being too opposed to that. Also, if you look at the Mesa merge requests for NVK, there have been a few with @nvidia.com emails. At least a few NVIDIA people are following and contributing even if only very little (one MR I saw was regarding an unknown bit that turned out to be an NVIDIA-internal test environment flag). Also, NVIDIA hired the former nouveau kernel-side maintainer and he just published a large nouveau patch set. I really hope we're seeing NVIDIA move towards acceptance of the open driver stack even if they continue to develop and push their proprietary one. Given their focus on AI and compute maybe they see letting Mesa handle graphics as less of a concern now. Maybe they want to get everything running on an upstreamable kernelspace driver. Who knows, but it's definitely looking better than it ever has for them.

If NVK is good enough maybe Nvidia will consider dropping the proprietary driver because no one will want to use it and it will cost too much for them to maintain a separate driver.

A man can dream.