Nvidia moves to cement its power with a nearly $13 billion purchase of a French startup named after an emoji

Nvidia is buying Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, turning the friendly-looking platform named after an emoji into one of the chipmaker’s biggest strategic bets. Nvidia announced the deal on Thursday.

Hugging Face is the leading platform for open-source AI models, whose underlying software and, in some cases, training data can be inspected. Users can access AI tools for free, share them and download datasets for training their own models.

That open-model market matters to Nvidia because it is expanding and the models are improving. Smaller companies and AI developers can use them to build their own tools, which in turn drives demand for AI infrastructure and Nvidia chips. Jensen Huang described the market as a “growth engine” and said, “Half of our business is driven by open models.” He also said other bidders had shown interest.

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growth engine

Hugging Face chief executive Clément Delangue said the company’s founders and entire team would move to Nvidia while continuing to operate the platform independently. The deal still requires approval from U.S. competition authorities. If it goes through, Delangue will have secured a huge outcome for the company he built with two fellow French founders.

Delangue and co-founders Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf came from France and arrived in New York in 2016 presenting themselves as underdogs. Delangue studied business administration and worked at Paris-based Moodstocks, a machine-learning company later acquired by Google. Chaumond met Delangue in Paris’s startup scene, while Chaumond knew Wolf from engineering school. Wolf said the two had played in the same rock band.

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Half of our business is driven by open models.