NVIDIA has agreed to acquire open-source AI platform Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, according to a report by The Information. The deal would give NVIDIA control of one of the largest repositories for open-source AI models and related tools.
Founded in 2016 by Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf, Hugging Face started as a chatbot company before becoming a major hub for the open-source AI community.
Its platform allows developers and researchers to publish, discover, download, and collaborate on AI models, datasets, and applications.
The acquisition comes as NVIDIA seeks to strengthen the open-source AI ecosystem.
NVIDIA’s leadership reportedly believes the growth of successful open models could help preserve its position in AI hardware by providing an alternative to closed-source models from companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic. These companies are also working to reduce their reliance on NVIDIA’s chips by developing competing AI hardware.
NVIDIA has been developing its own open-source AI models under the Nemotron brand and has committed tens of billions of dollars toward developing them. The company has also invested in other AI companies and infrastructure businesses that use or support its chips.
The reported valuation represents a large premium over Hugging Face’s recent revenue. The company is reportedly generating about $150 million in annualised revenue, putting NVIDIA’s proposed purchase price at roughly 80 times forward revenue.
The deal follows several other moves by NVIDIA into AI software and infrastructure. Last week, NVIDIA signed a $6 billion deal to license AI development tools from Poolside, an open-source AI model developer, and also offered to hire more than 100 of its employees.
Hugging Face is backed by investors including Salesforce, Lux Capital and Addition. NVIDIA had also invested in the company previously.
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