Nvidia confirms it will buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion

Nvidia announced on Wednesday that it has acquired Hugging Face for a staggering $12.93 billion. Hugging Face's platform is home to three million models, one million applications utilized by over 18 million developers, and a half-million datasets. In a blog post, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang emphasized that Hugging Face will maintain its open-source and open-weight approach, allowing developers to select their desired models, frameworks, clouds, inference service providers, and computing platforms.

Huang stated that Nvidia compute will not be necessary for developers to build upon or deploy through Hugging Face. The Nvidia executive highlighted that the company has contributed over 500 models and 250 open datasets to Hugging Face. Nvidia's acquisition of Hugging Face aligns with the company's goal of creating a platform that suits its chips and enables the sale of unused capacity to enterprise customers packaged with Hugging Face's offering.

Hugging Face was established in 2016 and has raised over $395 million in funding, with its most recent round in 2023 amounting to $235 million led by Salesforce Ventures, with investments from Google, Amazon, IBM, and Nvidia. Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue expressed gratitude to the community for enabling the company to become an alternative to closed-source APIs.

He acknowledged that to achieve this on a larger scale, additional compute, support, collaboration, and visibility are required. Hugging Face gained prominence by releasing models daily; last year, the company rejected a $500 million deal from Nvidia. Last month, The Information reported that Hugging Face generates $150 million in annualized revenue.

In a TechCrunch interview in July, Delangue mentioned that the platform's growth rate is bringing it closer to profitability.