NVIDIA agrees to acquire AI platform Hugging Face for $12.9 billion
NVIDIA has agreed to acquire artificial intelligence platform Hugging Face for $12.93 billion. The deal would bring one of the largest open-model communities under NVIDIA’s ownership.
NVIDIA has announced an agreement to acquire the artificial intelligence platform Hugging Face for approximately $12.93 billion. This acquisition will integrate one of the most significant communities for open AI models into NVIDIA's strategic portfolio.
Hugging Face boasts over 18 million users who share more than 3 million models, half a million datasets, and one million applications. More than 200,000 companies utilize the platform daily. The company has assured that Hugging Face will remain open following the acquisition. Developers will continue to have the freedom to choose their models, frameworks, cloud providers, and inference services. NVIDIA's hardware will not be a requirement for building or deploying through Hugging Face.
The platform will also continue its support for multiple cloud providers and AI accelerators. NVIDIA plans to leverage its infrastructure and engineering resources to enhance Hugging Face's reliability, safety, model evaluation, and inference and deployment capabilities.
Analysis suggests Hugging Face's importance to NVIDIA lies in its position as a critical hub for open-source and open-weight models, akin to GitHub's role in software development. Owning such a hub could allow NVIDIA to shape the future of open AI without mandating the use of its hardware. Analysts note that open models align with NVIDIA's strategy, as its hardware is compatible with a broad ecosystem.