Nvidia to buy Hugging Face in $12.93 billion deal

In a $12.93 billion acquisition, AI chipmaker Nvidia announced on Thursday its purchase of artificial intelligence software platform Hugging Face. According to the company, the deal aims to scale Hugging Face's platform, enhance its infrastructure, and broaden access to AI for developers and institutions globally.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang stated that together, they will expand the availability of AI for developers and institutions worldwide. Hugging Face currently hosts over 18 million users who have created over 3 million models in more than a million applications.

Founded in 2016 by three French entrepreneurs in New York, Hugging Face describes itself as "the AI community building the future." The company is known for its open models that can be downloaded and modified, unlike closed models from rivals such as OpenAI or Anthropic.

Huang emphasized that Hugging Face will continue to maintain its open platform for the entire AI ecosystem. Developers will have the freedom to choose their preferred models, frameworks, clouds, inference service providers, and computing platforms.

Nvidia, recognized for its GPUs, has already contributed over 500 models to Hugging Face and over 250 open datasets. This acquisition comes as more companies and software developers are increasingly turning to open models to reduce costs, as they tend to be more affordable than closed alternatives.

Hugging Face co-founder Clem Delangue expressed his excitement about joining Nvidia, stating that the goal is to join the company as an independently neutral platform within the Nvidia team. He told CNBC that the entire Hugging Face team, including Delangue, his two co-founders, and the rest of the team, will remain on and join Nvidia as part of this move.