Nvidia buys Hugging Face for $12.9B in push into AI software

Nvidia announced on Thursday its acquisition of Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, a platform utilized by over 18 million developers for sharing and deploying AI models. This move expands Nvidia's presence in the software that developers use to construct and release artificial intelligence. Hugging Face provides an open-source AI platform for sharing models, datasets, and development tools.

Over 18 million developers, researchers, and creators rely on it to share over 3 million models, 500,000 datasets, and 1 million applications, as stated by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. "Hugging Face will maintain its status as an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem," Huang affirmed, emphasizing developers' freedom to select their models, frameworks, cloud providers, and computing platforms.

Nvidia hardware is not a prerequisite for building or deploying through Hugging Face, he added. Nvidia already contributes more than 500 models and 250 open datasets to Hugging Face. The company assured that Hugging Face will continue supporting models from other developers and multiple cloud and accelerator providers. The acquisition follows Hugging Face's disclosure of a security breach, where an autonomous AI agent gained unauthorized access to internal datasets and service credentials, but no evidence of tampering with public models, datasets, or applications was found.