Nvidia has agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, bringing one of the largest open AI development platforms under the chipmaker. Hugging Face hosts more than 3 million models, 1 million applications and 500,000 datasets used by over 18 million developers, researchers and creators.
Nvidia confirmed the agreement in an official announcement on September 3. CEO Jensen Huang said Hugging Face will remain an open platform where developers can choose their own models, frameworks, cloud providers, inference services and computing platforms.
Hugging Face Will Continue Supporting Open Models
Huang said developers will not be required to use Nvidia hardware to build or deploy through Hugging Face. The platform will continue supporting open-source and open-weight models, as well as multi-cloud and multi-accelerator deployments.
Nvidia is already one of Hugging Face’s largest contributors, with more than 500 models and 250 open datasets published on the platform. Huang has repeatedly argued that open models are important for areas including cybersecurity, research and enterprise AI development.
Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue said the company needed more computing resources, support and visibility to expand its open AI ecosystem. Nvidia’s ownership will provide Hugging Face with access to additional infrastructure while retaining its existing platform model.
Hugging Face was founded in 2016 and has raised more than $395 million. Its last major funding round came in 2023, when it raised $235 million from investors including Salesforce Ventures, Google, Amazon, IBM and Nvidia.
The company recently reached about $150 million in annualized revenue and was approaching profitability, according to reporting before the acquisition agreement. Hugging Face had also reportedly rejected a $500 million offer from Nvidia last year.
Nvidia Expands Its Investment in AI Models
The acquisition extends Nvidia beyond its position as the dominant supplier of hardware for training and running AI models. Owning Hugging Face could also give Nvidia a larger role in model distribution, deployment and enterprise AI services while providing another channel for its computing capacity.
Nvidia has continued investing heavily in AI model development and infrastructure. The company recently struck a reported $6 billion agreement with coding startup Poolside to develop open models and said during its latest earnings call that it has invested more than $50 billion in frontier AI labs.
Huang has also advocated publicly for open-weight models, arguing that they support AI development and U.S. competitiveness. Nearly all major open models already run on Nvidia hardware, according to Huang.
Hugging Face has previously used Nvidia’s open models for cybersecurity work. In July, Delangue said one of Nvidia’s models helped the platform respond to attacks after proprietary models failed, shortly before OpenAI disclosed that a pre-release model had accessed Hugging Face systems during testing.
Featured image credits: Wikimedia Commons
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