The deal will see NVIDIA corner the market in both AI hardware and software.
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang has announced NVIDIA is buying Hugging Face in a deal valued at $12.93 billion. In a statement, Huang said NVIDIA will work to scale Hugging Face’s platform, strengthen its infrastructure, and expand access to AI. If the deal meets regulatory approval, it will put NVIDIA in a dominant position in both AI hardware and open AI software.
If you’re unaware, Hugging Face is essentially GitHub with a specific focus on AI, enabling developers to share, discover and test open source AI models. In 2022, as the generative AI boom began, the platform established itself as the central hub for this community and has since seen remarkable growth. At present, it says it has more than 18 million users sharing three million models, with more than 200,000 companies using the models generated in their businesses.
Huang has pledged that Hugging Face will “remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem” and users will not be obliged to use NVIDIA products in their work. Huang affirmed his commitment to the open source AI ecosystem, citing a letter he recently published in support of open source models. He added NVIDIA is a big contributor to Hugging Face’s platform, including more than 500 models and 250 open datasets.
Some analysts believe that open-source or open-weight AI will play an increasingly important role alongside proprietary frontier models from the OpenAIs, Anthropics and Googles of the world. Earlier this month, Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue said China was winning the AI race due to its embrace of open models.
NVIDIA was already an investor in Hugging Face, having participated in at least one funding round in 2023. Google, Amazon, Salesforce, AMD, Intel, IBM and Qualcomm were among the startup’s other investors.
