Nvidia has acquired Hugging Face for $12,930,300,000 in a huge move for the AI industry

Nvidia has announced its acquisition of open-source AI model repository Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, as the company seeks to bolster its presence in the expanding AI ecosystem. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang stated that the acquisition will enable Nvidia to expand Hugging Face's platform, enhance its infrastructure, and provide increased access to AI for developers and institutions.

Huang emphasized that Hugging Face would continue to support open source and open weight models, multi-cloud and multi-accelerator development and deployment, allowing builders to utilize the hardware and infrastructure that best suits their needs. The deal is anticipated to be finalized in the first half of 2027. Nvidia, a strong advocate for open source AI models, has contributed over 500 AI models to Hugging Face, which hosts three million models and serves approximately 18 million developers.

Founded in France in 2016 and based in New York, Hugging Face offers a platform for developers to download AI models, access tools for running models, obtain datasets for training AI models, and collaborate on AI models within a community. Nvidia's investment in Hugging Face was evident in a $235 million Series D funding round in 2023, which valued the company at $4.5 billion, marking its most recent valuation.

The acquisition highlights Nvidia's substantial investments across the AI ecosystem, including billions allocated to AI labs and support for startups utilizing its chips. Hugging Face co-founder Thomas Wolf expressed that Nvidia was the most natural fit for its mission, being a close partner across various initiatives, including open-source, open-weights, open science, robotics, and AI for scientific purposes.

Upon receiving the opportunity to double down on building the Hub as an open, independent, and compute-agnostic platform, Hugging Face co-founders decided to initiate the next decade of their journey together with Nvidia.