Nvidia to buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion: What changes for open-source AI, rivals

Nvidia plans to acquire AI platform Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, a deal that highlights the chip maker's expanding influence in the artificial intelligence industry. The acquisition could potentially result in more control over the AI ecosystem for Nvidia, as well as raise concerns among competitors and regulators. Following the announcement, Nvidia confirmed that it has entered into a formal agreement to buy Hugging Face, a popular repository of open-weight AI models.

With the acquisition, Hugging Face aims to increase its user base from 18 million developers to 100 million. Additionally, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang emphasized that Hugging Face's open-source commitment will continue, allowing it to support various model builders and multi-cloud and multi-accelerator development and deployment.