Nvidia doesn’t need to block rival chips on Hugging Face. It just needs the defaults.

Nvidia is reportedly on the verge of acquiring Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, a significant move that could reshape the landscape of AI platforms. Hugging Face's Optimum libraries support various chipmakers, including Nvidia, AMD, Intel, and AWS, making it an intriguing target for Nvidia. The company plays a crucial role in developers' model deployment, including ease of running models on the preferred hardware.

If Nvidia acquires Hugging Face, it may favor its own hardware in default settings, but the support for AMD, Intel, and AWS could remain unchanged. The larger question is how this acquisition will impact the ecosystem over time, as Nvidia could potentially make deployment easier for its own hardware or even push competitors to reconsider their engineering efforts.

For developers, the choice between paths might come down to which requires less work. Open models, often expected to run on different environments, are gaining traction, and Hugging Face's role in making this possible is invaluable to Nvidia. However, pushing the platform too heavily toward Nvidia hardware might make it less appealing to developers reliant on diverse systems.

Despite Hugging Face's revenue of about $150 million, Nvidia's acquisition price of $12.9 billion suggests a much broader investment in the platform's future.