NVIDIA To Acquire Hugging Face For US$12.93 billion

NVIDIA has reached an agreement to acquire AI development platform Hugging Face for a sum of US$12.93 billion. This significant move marks NVIDIA's expansion beyond AI hardware, aiming to increase the platform's accessibility to developers and institutions globally. CEO Jensen Huang emphasized that the acquisition will enable both companies to scale Hugging Face's platform and enhance its offerings.

The acquisition will provide Hugging Face with crucial infrastructure, engineering resources, and a wider global reach, while preserving its existing brand and ongoing development. Despite the deal, Hugging Face will continue to operate freely within the AI ecosystem, allowing users to select their preferred models, frameworks, cloud providers, inference services, and computing platforms.

This means that NVIDIA hardware is not a prerequisite for utilizing the platform. It is worth noting that NVIDIA has been a major contributor to Hugging Face, releasing over 500 models and more than 250 open datasets on the platform, along with various libraries and development tools. The acquisition aligns with NVIDIA's ongoing promotion of open-weight AI models, as CEO Jensen Huang recently co-authored an open letter advocating for open weights to broaden AI access.

This push gained attention after a July cyberattack on Hugging Face, leading NVIDIA to join over 30 companies in forming the Open Secure AI Alliance. The alliance aims to develop open AI technologies for cybersecurity, promoting safeguards while encouraging their use. As part of this initiative, NVIDIA will contribute open models, model weights, data, and research into AI agent infrastructure, while Hugging Face will offer a format for securely storing AI model weights.