Nvidia Corporation announced on Thursday that it has agreed to acquire the open-source AI platform Hugging Face for $12.93 billion.
While rumors and speculation about Nvidia’s potential play had been swirling for weeks, the chipmaker has now made it official.
Hugging Face, which is something of a GitHub for AI, has a library of models and datasets that should make Nvidia an even more dominant player in the AI ecosystem.
Shares of Nvidia were up roughly 1.45% in early trading on Thursday after the news was announced. The stock (Nasdaq: NVDA) is up almost 21% year to date, outperforming the broader Nasdaq Composite’s roughly 14%.
What Nvidia’s boss is saying
In a blog post announcing the acquisition, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang appeared to imply that not much would change for Hugging Face users.
“Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem,” Huang wrote. “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.”
He continued: “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.”
Hugging Face leadership is “super happy”
New York City-based Hugging Face was founded in 2016. In August 2023, it was valued at around $4.5 billion after its last funding round that included Nvidia, as well as Salesforce and Alphabet.
Data from Crunchbase shows that it’s raised $395 million in funding to date. Hugging Face has also recently been in the news after rogue AI agents broke away from OpenAI and breached its network in July.
Despite that, Hugging Face’s leadership is “super happy” about the Nvidia acquisition, as its new parent company will allow it to continue working toward its goal of providing an alternative to closed-source APIs in the AI space, according to an X post from CEO Clem Delangue.
“[We’ve] shown that it can be a complement, and even an alternative, to closed-source APIs,” he wrote. “But for it to happen at a larger scale, it needs more compute, more support, more collaboration, and more visibility.”
