Nvidia acquires Hugging Face for nearly $13 billion

Nvidia has officially agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, moving beyond its traditional role as a chipmaker and deeper into the infrastructure of artificial intelligence.

The deal puts one of the largest open-source AI communities under Nvidia’s ownership. Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive, said the companies would expand Hugging Face’s platform, strengthen its infrastructure and widen access to AI for developers and institutions worldwide.

Hugging Face will remain open despite the acquisition. Developers will still be able to choose their own models, frameworks and service providers, and they will not have to use Nvidia computing to build or deploy projects through the platform.

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Together, we will expand the Hugging Face platform, strengthen its infrastructure and expand access to AI for developers and institutions around the world.

“Together, we will expand the Hugging Face platform, strengthen its infrastructure and expand access to AI for developers and institutions around the world,” Huang said. He also pointed to the importance of open model weights, saying they broaden access to AI and help distribute leadership across companies, institutions and communities.

More than 18 million developers, researchers and creators currently use Hugging Face. The platform hosts more than 3 million models, 500,000 datasets and 1 million applications. More than 200,000 companies use it to discover, evaluate, customize and deploy AI. The purchase ranks as Nvidia’s second-largest acquisition, after the company paid $20 billion for assets from chipmaker Groq in December of the previous year.

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Open model weights broaden access to AI and help ensure that leadership in AI is distributed among companies, institutions and communities.