Nvidia to acquire AI platform Hugging Face for $12.9 billion
Founded in 2016 in New York by three French entrepreneurs, Hugging Face promotes open models—which can be downloaded and modified—in contrast to the closed models offered by rivals such as OpenAI and Anthropic.
Nvidia logo in Shanghai / Hector Retamal
Semiconductor giant Nvidia will acquire the artificial intelligence platform Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, the company announced Thursday in a press release.
Founded in 2016 in New York by three French entrepreneurs, Hugging Face promotes open models, which can be downloaded and modified, in contrast to closed models such as those from its rivals OpenAI or Anthropic.
"Together, we will scale Hugging Face’s platform, strengthen its infrastructure and expand access to AI for developers and institutions worldwide," said Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang when announcing the acquisition.
The price represents a significant increase over the $7 billion valuation that served as the basis for initial negotiations with Nvidia late last year, according to U.S. media reports.
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Huang noted that Nvidia would not change Hugging Face's core model with the acquisition.
"Hugging Face will continue to support open source and open weight models," he said. It will remain "an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem," he emphasized.
According to Nvidia's press release, the A.I. platform has more than 18 million users, who have created more than 3 million models and more than one million applications.
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The incident fueled concerns that A.I. giants may not be able to keep their own technology under control, with similar incidents reported by Anthropic and Moonshot AI.
Nvidia is best known for its GPUs—specialized chips originally designed to render graphics for video games at high speeds, which have more recently become the driving force behind chatbots and other A.I. tools.
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