Nvidia is paying $12.9 billion to keep open models on its chips
I’m Matt Burns, Chief Content Officer at Insight Media Group. Each week, I round up the most important AI developments, The post Nvidia is paying $12.9 billion to keep open models on its chips appeared first on The New Stack .
Nvidia has agreed to pay $12.9 billion for Hugging Face, a leading platform for open-source AI models, according to The Information. This move is reminiscent of Microsoft's acquisition of GitHub in 2018. The purchase is significant because Hugging Face hosts a vast array of open models that developers frequently use and fine-tune.
Nvidia is investing in maintaining the platform's relevance, as a substantial portion of open model development and deployment occurs on its infrastructure. With Nvidia reporting $96.2 billion in quarterly revenue, $12.9 billion represents approximately 12 days of sales. By acquiring Hugging Face, Nvidia aims to ensure that open-source alternatives to its own offerings remain viable and valuable to developers.
The company will own not only the website with $150 million in annual revenue but also the leaderboard, datasets, and the popular Transformers library that many AI developers rely on. While open models are not yet the primary production traffic, their influence is growing rapidly. In February, Chinese open models accounted for more than 30% of U.S. token usage on OpenRouter, with a peak of 46%.
As competition in AI intensifies, open models are increasingly becoming the default choice for developers, driving Nvidia's investment in this market. For AI developers, this acquisition signals the need to adapt to changing defaults in AI infrastructure, as dependencies on open models can provide a strategic advantage in the long run.
Written by urgent.news from The New Stack's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
