Nvidia to Acquire Hugging Face for $12.9B
Nvidia has agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, a deal that would bring one of artificial intelligence’s largest open-source developer platforms under the control of the world’s dominant supplier of AI chips.
Nvidia said it plans to scale Hugging Face’s platform, strengthen its infrastructure and expand access to AI tools for developers and institutions globally. The transaction would be Nvidia’s second-largest acquisition, following its $20 billion purchase of Groq assets in December.
Hugging Face has become a central repository and collaboration platform for AI developers, researchers and companies. More than 18 million users share and access more than three million models, 500,000 data sets and one million applications through the platform. More than 200,000 companies use Hugging Face to discover, evaluate, customize and deploy AI models, Nvidia said.
The acquisition is notable because Hugging Face has positioned itself as a neutral, open platform in an AI market increasingly dominated by proprietary models, cloud providers and specialized computing systems. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the company would preserve that approach.
“Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem,” Huang said in a blog post. “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 said Hugging Face will continue to support multi-cloud and multi-accelerator development and deployment, allowing developers to choose infrastructure suited to their applications. That pledge could be closely watched by AI developers and rival chip providers, given Nvidia’s dominant position in the market for data-center accelerators.
The companies have worked together since at least 2023, when they announced a partnership to give Hugging Face developers access to Nvidia DGX Cloud computing for training and tuning large language models. Nvidia later introduced inference services through Hugging Face powered by its NIM microservices and DGX Cloud platform.
Nvidia is already Hugging Face’s largest contributor of open models and data, with more than 500 models and 250 open data sets on the platform. The deal would give Nvidia deeper ownership of a widely used distribution channel for AI software, models and developer tools while raising questions about how it will balance strategic control with Hugging Face’s commitment to openness.