NVIDIA Confirms $12.9 Bn Deal to Acquire Hugging Face

NVIDIA has agreed to acquire AI platform Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, CEO Jensen Huang announced on September 3. 

The deal will bring Hugging Face’s platform for AI models, datasets and applications under NVIDIA, while the platform will continue to support open-source and open-weight models across different hardware and cloud providers.

“Together, we will scale Hugging Face’s platform, strengthen its infrastructure and expand access to AI for developers and institutions worldwide,” Huang said in a statement.

Hugging Face has more than 18 million developers, researchers and creators using its platform to share more than 3 million models, 500,000 datasets and 1 million applications. More than 200,000 companies use the platform to discover, evaluate, customise and deploy AI.

NVIDIA said Hugging Face will remain an open platform and developers will be able to choose their models, frameworks, cloud and inference providers, and computing platforms. “NVIDIA compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face,” Huang said.

The platform will also continue to support multi-cloud and multi-accelerator development and deployment. This will allow developers to use hardware and infrastructure from different providers.

The acquisition comes as open-weight AI models become more widely used by startups, businesses, universities and public institutions. Huang said open models allow organisations to build on advanced AI capabilities without having to train models from scratch.

NVIDIA has contributed more than 500 models and over 250 open datasets to Hugging Face. The company said it is the largest contributor of open models and data to the platform.

In July, Huang co-authored an open letter calling for support for open-weight AI models, arguing that they can broaden access to advanced AI, strengthen competition and prevent the technology from becoming concentrated among a few companies.

“In addition to doubling down on NVIDIA’s massive contributions to open-source AI (I called them the “King of American open-source AI” earlier this year), they’ve committed to strongly supporting Hugging Face and our mission while keeping the platform open, independent and compute-agnostic,” Clément Delangue, CEO of Hugging Face, said in a post on X 

“Together, we think we can make open source the default way to build AI, with the goal of empowering 100 million AI builders to own their intelligence rather than rent it,” he added.

Following the acquisition, NVIDIA plans to use its infrastructure, engineering resources and global reach to expand Hugging Face’s capabilities in areas including platform reliability, safety, model evaluation, inference and deployment.

Huang said Delangue approached him while considering the company’s next phase and believed NVIDIA would be a suitable home for the platform and its community.

“Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem,” Huang said.