Nvidia agrees to buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion
Nvidia has agreed to buy AI firm Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, extending beyond chips into the broader AI stack. CEO Jensen Huang said Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the AI ecosystem.
Hugging Face has exploded in popularity, providing an open-source hub for collaborative machine learning.
Nvidia has agreed to buy AI firm Hugging Face for $12.9 billion in a move that expands the chipmaker’s capabilities beyond hardware and up the AI stack.
Hugging Face — the AI company at the center of a hacking incident earlier this year that raised cybersecurity concerns — has exploded in popularity, now boasting 18 million users, providing an open-source hub for collaborative machine learning.
In a blog post Thursday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said Hugging Face “ will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem.” The deal follows a series of acquisitions within the AI industry as chipmakers and financial companies alike rush to lock down the open models atop the AI stack.
The Hugging Face deal marks the second-largest for Nvidia; the chip company entered a $20 billion non-exclusive agreement to buy assets from chipmaker Groq in December.
The chip company closed a similar deal last month, striking a $6 billion structured agreement with Poolside, an open-weight model builder.
Also last month, financial infrastructure firm Stripe agreed to acquire open-weight model aggregator OpenRouter for $7.5 billion.