NVIDIA to Acquire Hugging Face

NVIDIA confirmed its acquisition of Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, aiming to scale the platform, enhance its infrastructure, and broaden access to AI for developers and institutions globally. Hugging Face, founded by Clem, Julien, and Thomas, has fostered a thriving community of over 18 million developers, researchers, and creators who have contributed more than 3 million models, 500,000 datasets, and 1 million applications.

The platform supports over 200,000 companies in discovering, evaluating, customizing, and deploying AI solutions. Hugging Face remains committed to being an open platform, allowing developers to select their preferred models, frameworks, clouds, and inference service providers. NVIDIA's involvement will bolster the platform's reliability, safety, model evaluation, inference, and deployment capabilities without mandating NVIDIA compute for building or deploying on Hugging Face.

The company will continue to support open-source and open weight models, multi-cloud and multi-accelerator development, and deployment, ensuring builders can leverage the most suitable hardware and infrastructure. NVIDIA has been an ardent advocate of open weight models for years, evidenced by its multiyear investments and significant contributions to open source platforms like Hugging Face.

The company has contributed hundreds of open models and datasets to Hugging Face and will leverage its infrastructure, engineering prowess, and global reach to further strengthen the platform's capabilities while maintaining its open ecosystem. This acquisition marks a pivotal moment for the AI community, promising a future where AI is more open, capable, and accessible to people and institutions worldwide.