Nvidia puts its money where its mouth is on open weight AI, moving to buy Hugging Face for $13 billion

Nvidia has announced its intention to acquire Hugging Face, a leading platform for open-source machine learning applications, in a deal worth $13 billion. This acquisition is particularly noteworthy given Nvidia's recent focus on AI, with the company spending billions on AI-related ventures. Hugging Face's CEO, Clément Delangue, expressed his excitement about joining Nvidia, describing it as a "perfect home."

The deal includes a significant payment to Hugging Face's investors of $11.9 billion and an equity-based retention program for Nvidia employees, amounting to up to $1 billion. Despite the substantial investment, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang emphasized that Hugging Face will continue to operate as an open platform, allowing developers to choose models, frameworks, clouds, inference service providers, and computing platforms.

Huang stressed that Hugging Face will not require Nvidia compute for deployment or building purposes. The CEO also highlighted the importance of open models in advancing AI safely, strengthening cybersecurity, and accelerating innovation across various industries.