Nvidia has announced its acquisition of Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, marking a significant investment by the chip manufacturer into open-source artificial intelligence development. The deal was revealed by Nvidia co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang, who emphasized the strategic importance of supporting the broader AI ecosystem through the transaction.
Hugging Face operates a widely-used platform where millions of developers, researchers, and organizations collaborate on AI model development. The platform currently hosts contributions from over 18 million users and is utilized by more than 200,000 companies for discovering, evaluating, and deploying AI systems. Founded in 2016 by French entrepreneurs, the company has become a central hub for the open-source AI community.
Huang stated that Hugging Face will maintain its commitment to remaining platform-agnostic, supporting developers’ choice of models, frameworks, cloud services, and computing hardware. The acquisition price represents a relatively modest portion of Nvidia’s $5.5 trillion market valuation. Hugging Face CEO Clement Delangue indicated that his company initiated discussions about the partnership several weeks ago, recognizing the need for increased resources and scale during a critical period for open-source AI development.
Originally reported by Variety →
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