Nvidia Pays $12.9 Billion to Buy and Expand Hugging Face

On September 3, Nvidia announced it would acquire artificial intelligence platform Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, as reported by the company's founder and CEO, Jensen Huang. Together, Nvidia and Hugging Face aim to scale Hugging Face's platform, enhance its infrastructure, and broaden access to AI for developers and institutions globally.

Hugging Face currently hosts over 18 million developers, researchers, and creators who share more than 3 million models, 500,000 datasets, and 1 million applications. Additionally, 200,000 companies rely on the platform for discovering, assessing, customizing, and deploying AI solutions. Despite the acquisition, Hugging Face will remain an open platform, allowing developers to select their preferred models, frameworks, clouds, inference service providers, and computing platforms.

Nvidia will not be mandatory for developers to build on or deploy through Hugging Face. The acquisition aligns with Nvidia's strategy to support open-weight models, which Delangue, Hugging Face CEO, believes is crucial for democratizing AI and preventing the concentration of AI leadership in specific companies, institutions, and communities.