Hugging Face’s $12.9bn sale is both inspiring and dispiriting for Europe

In a deal worth $12.9 billion, Nvidia has acquired the artificial intelligence platform Hugging Face. Nvidia will pay Hugging Face investors around $11.9 billion, with the option to offer up to $1 billion in stock-based incentives. Amazon, AMD, and Intel are among the other investors in Hugging Face. Nvidia president and CEO Jensen Huang stated in a blog post that Hugging Face will remain open-source and developers will not be required to use Nvidia technology.

The acquisition aims to enhance Nvidia's infrastructure, engineering capabilities, and global reach to improve Hugging Face's reliability, safety, model evaluation, inference, and deployment. Hugging Face was founded in 2016 by Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf. Delangue expressed his excitement about the acquisition, stating that Nvidia provided the platform with the necessary resources, scale, and visibility.

Nvidia has been a significant contributor to Hugging Face, releasing over 500 models and more than 250 open datasets. Huang emphasized that the deal aligns with their shared vision for an open, capable, and accessible AI future.