NVIDIA has agreed to acquire Hugging Face for approximately $12.93 billion, bringing one of the largest open AI model and developer platforms under the chipmaker as it seeks to expand infrastructure and access to artificial intelligence worldwide. Details about the deal started to surface in late August.
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang announced the agreement, saying the companies plan to scale Hugging Face’s platform, strengthen its infrastructure and expand AI access for developers and institutions.
Hugging Face has grown into a major hub for the open AI ecosystem, with more than 18 million developers, researchers and creators using the platform.
Users have shared more than 3 million models, 500,000 datasets and 1 million applications through Hugging Face, while more than 200,000 companies use the platform to discover, evaluate, customize and deploy AI models.
NVIDIA said Hugging Face will remain an open platform following the acquisition. Developers will continue to be able to select their preferred models, frameworks, cloud providers, inference services and computing platforms.
NVIDIA compute will not be required to develop or deploy AI through Hugging Face.
Hugging Face will also continue supporting open-source and open-weight models from model developers across the industry, along with multi-cloud and multi-accelerator development and deployment.
That commitment is central to NVIDIA’s stated strategy for the transaction. Huang has argued that open-weight models can broaden access to advanced AI capabilities by allowing startups, enterprises, universities and public institutions to build on existing models rather than training every system from the ground up.
NVIDIA has already become a major contributor to the Hugging Face ecosystem. The company has released more than 500 models and more than 250 open datasets on the platform and has contributed models, libraries and development tools intended for broader use by the AI community.
Through the acquisition, NVIDIA expects its infrastructure, engineering capabilities and global reach to support improvements to Hugging Face in areas including platform reliability, AI safety, model evaluation, inference and deployment.
Hugging Face’s leadership and team will join NVIDIA while continuing to operate under the Hugging Face brand.
The acquisition would give NVIDIA a direct position in one of the most widely used platforms for distributing and developing open AI models, complementing its existing leadership in AI computing infrastructure.
KEY QUOTE:
“I’m excited to announce that NVIDIA has agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12,930,300,000. Together, we will scale Hugging Face’s platform, strengthen its infrastructure and expand access to AI for developers and institutions worldwide.
Over the past decade, Clem, Julien, Thomas and the team at Hugging Face have built something remarkable: a vibrant home for the open model developer community.
Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem. Developers will choose the models they want, the frameworks they want, the clouds and inference service providers they want and the computing platforms they want. NVIDIA compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face.
Hugging Face will continue to support open source and open weight models from across the ecosystem, from every model builder. It will continue to support multi-cloud and multi-accelerator development and deployment, so builders can use the hardware and infrastructure that best fit their work.
As the opportunity for open models accelerates, Hugging Face can serve the global AI community at unprecedented scale. NVIDIA’s infrastructure, engineering and global reach can help improve platform reliability, safety, model evaluation, inference and deployment capabilities, while preserving the open ecosystem that made Hugging Face foundational.”
Jensen Huang, Founder and CEO of NVIDIA
