Nvidia to spend $13 bil. on Hugging Face, leaving it as open source platform

Nvidia announced on Thursday that it plans to purchase AI software platform Hugging Face for $12.93 billion. In a blog post, Nvidia co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang revealed that over 18 million developers, researchers and creators rely on Hugging Face to share more than 3 million models, 500,000 datasets and 1 million applications. Huang also stated that there are over 200,000 companies utilizing the platform.

Despite the acquisition, Nvidia has assured that Hugging Face will maintain its open platform status. Huang emphasized that developers will have the freedom to choose their preferred models, frameworks, clouds, inference service providers and computing platforms when building and deploying on Hugging Face. Nvidia's compute will not be mandatory for developers to incorporate or deploy through the platform.

Hugging Face will continue to support open source and open weight models, as well as multi-cloud and multi-accelerator development and deployment. The company has already contributed over 500 models and more than 250 open datasets to Hugging Face. Nvidia's stock saw a slight increase before the market opened following the announcement of the acquisition.