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Nvidia buys Hugging Face

1 d ago

Nvidia has officially agreed to acquire open-source AI platform Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, marking the chipmaker's second-largest deal ever and signaling its strategic push beyond hardware into the full AI software stack. The acquisition, first reported by The Information last week, was confirmed Thursday by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who wrote in a blog post that Hugging Face will "remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem." Together, the companies aim to scale the platform, strengthen infrastructure, and expand AI access for developers worldwide. Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue told CNBC he approached Huang over the summer, and discussions moved quickly because Nvidia was "a perfect home." The deal follows Nvidia's $20 billion purchase of chipmaker Groq in December and its $7 billion acquisition of Mellanox in 2019. Nvidia, now the world's most valuable company due to surging demand for its GPUs powering generative AI, is betting big on Hugging Face's popular open-source community. Delangue, a proponent of open models, noted that a recent hacking incident at Hugging Face—blamed on engineering mistakes—was resolved using an Nvidia version of a Chinese open model. He said the breach underscored the need to "double down" on open-source AI. Huang added that open-source environments give defenders an "asymmetric advantage" over attackers by enabling transparent collaboration. The acquisition underscores Nvidia's evolution from a chipmaker into a comprehensive AI infrastructure provider.