Why Nvidia Is Spending $13 Billion to Buy Franco-American AI Star Hugging Face

Nvidia is spending $13 billion on Hugging Face, making one of its biggest acquisitions to secure a leading platform for open-source artificial intelligence.

The Franco-American startup, founded in 2016 by French entrepreneurs Thomas Wolf, Julien Chaumond and Clément Delangue, has built a model library that developers around the world rely on. Nvidia announced the purchase after reporting another exceptionally strong set of financial results.

Hugging Face operates as a collaborative marketplace for AI. Users can create a model, train it on their own data or on datasets available through the platform, and share their work with the community for free. Other developers can then examine, discuss and improve those models.

The acquisition also fits with Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang’s repeated support for open source, which he argues can help spread AI more widely. For Nvidia, the purchase brings together the company’s powerful position in AI chips and a platform built around the development and circulation of models. The deal places Hugging Face’s open-source library at the center of one of the technology sector’s largest acquisitions.