Nvidia buying artificial intelligence platform Hugging Face for $13 billion

Technology giant Nvidia announced on Thursday that it has acquired AI startup Hugging Face for $12.9 billion. Hugging Face, based in New York and founded in 2016 by French entrepreneurs Clement Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf, has become a vital resource for developers and institutions in the AI community.

Nvidia's chief, Jensen Huang, stated in a blog post that the acquisition allows them to enhance Hugging Face's platform, improve its infrastructure, and broaden access to AI for developers and institutions worldwide. He described Hugging Face as "a vibrant home for the open model developer community," noting that over 18 million developers, researchers, and creators utilize the platform to share more than 3 million models, 500,000 datasets, and 1 million applications.

Over 200,000 companies rely on Hugging Face to discover, evaluate, customize, and deploy AI. Huang emphasized that the platform will remain open, allowing developers to select their preferred models, frameworks, clouds, inference service providers, and computing platforms. Nvidia's compute will not be a requirement for developers to build upon or deploy through Hugging Face.

Huang also highlighted the importance of open-source and open-weight models, stating that they enable organizations to leverage advanced capabilities without the need to train every model from scratch. This approach allows AI to advance safely, enhance cybersecurity and sovereignty, accelerate innovation, and reach various sectors such as factories, hospitals, farms, classrooms, and Main Street businesses. Huang concluded by emphasizing that AI progresses faster when people collaborate together.