Nvidia reportedly acquires AI project hosting platform Hugging Face for $12.9B

Nvidia has reportedly acquired AI project hosting platform Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, according to reports. Rumors of the acquisition first surfaced on Monday, with Business Insider breaking the news that Hugging Face had received interest from multiple prospective buyers. The Information confirmed the deal was secured on late Wednesday.

Nvidia reportedly entered the competition after Salesforce Inc. expressed takeover interest. Hugging Face was launched in 2016 with a chatbot service for teens, and two years later, it open-sourced a framework for building AI applications. The company's flagship product, a GitHub-like platform for hosting open-source AI models, was launched in 2020.

Hugging Face currently hosts over 2 million models, and developers can access tens of thousands of free training datasets, user-created AI applications, and technical assets. Nvidia already uses Hugging Face to host its open-source AI projects, and the startup generates revenue through a paid version of its platform. Hugging Face offers two paid services: Inference Endpoints, which enables developers to host inference workloads, and a cybersecurity-focused version called Hugging Face Hub.

The acquisition allows Nvidia to align the platform's feature roadmap with its business goals and create more competition for Stripe Inc., which recently acquired AI model marketplace operator OpenRouter Inc. for $7.5 billion.