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Nvidia confirms it will buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion

1 d ago

Nvidia has confirmed the acquisition of AI model platform Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, a move that cements its dominance in the AI chip and developer ecosystem while keeping Hugging Face as an open platform. Hugging Face hosts three million models, one million applications used by over 18 million developers, and half a million datasets. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang stated that Hugging Face will continue supporting open-source and open-weight models, emphasizing that Nvidia compute is not required to build or deploy on the platform. Huang noted Nvidia has released over 500 models and 250 open datasets on Hugging Face, positioning the acquisition to sell unused GPU capacity to enterprise customers bundled with Hugging Face’s offerings. Founded in 2016, Hugging Face raised over $395 million, including a $235 million round in 2023 led by Salesforce Ventures with investments from Google, Amazon, IBM, and Nvidia. The company previously rejected a $500 million deal from Nvidia last year, according to the Financial Times, and now clocks $150 million in annualized revenue, nearing profitability per CEO Clem Delangue. Delangue said on X that the partnership provides more compute, support, and visibility for the AI ecosystem. Nvidia has been a strong proponent of open models, recently striking a $6 billion deal with coding startup Poolside and infusing over $50 billion into AI frontier labs. Huang highlighted open models’ role in cybersecurity, noting that Nvidia’s open model helped Hugging Face defend against cyberattacks after proprietary models failed. The acquisition reinforces Nvidia’s strategy to control the AI hardware platform while fostering an open ecosystem that benefits its chips.