Nvidia to buy Hugging Face for nearly $13 billion

Nvidia has reached a deal to acquire AI firm Hugging Face for roughly $12.9 billion, significantly expanding the chipmaker's capabilities beyond hardware and up the AI stack. Hugging Face, plagued by a cybersecurity incident earlier this year, has witnessed a surge in popularity, currently serving an estimated 18 million users as an open-source hub for collaborative machine learning.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced in a blog post that Hugging Face will maintain its status as an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem. This acquisition follows a series of deals within the AI industry as chipmakers and financial institutions strive to secure open models at the top of the AI stack. The Hugging Face acquisition ranks as Nvidia's second-largest deal; in December, the chipmaker signed a $20 billion non-exclusive agreement to acquire assets from chipmaker Groq.

Earlier this month, Nvidia also finalized a $6 billion structured agreement to acquire Poolside, an open-weight model builder. Last month, financial infrastructure firm Stripe agreed to acquire open-weight model aggregator OpenRouter for $7.5 billion.