Nvidia confirms it will buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion

In short: Nvidia says it has acquired Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, and it says Hugging Face will stay open to the wider AI community.

What happened

Nvidia confirmed it has acquired Hugging Face for $12.93 billion after weeks of reports about a possible deal. Hugging Face runs a popular site where people share and use AI models, which are ready-made “brains” for tasks like writing text or recognizing images (like downloading an app instead of building one from scratch).

Nvidia said Hugging Face hosts over 3 million models. It also said the platform is used by more than 18 million developers, plus it hosts about 1 million applications and about 500,000 datasets, which are collections of information used to train and test AI.

In a blog post, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said Hugging Face will continue to support open-source and open-weight models. He also said Nvidia chips will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face, meaning users should still be able to choose other computing providers.

Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue said the company wanted more “compute,” which means more computing power to run AI (like needing more ovens to bake more bread at once). Hugging Face was founded in 2016 and has raised over $395 million in funding, and it raised $235 million in 2023 in a round that included Nvidia.

Why it matters

Hugging Face is a central place many people use to find and share AI tools. If Nvidia keeps it open as promised, most users may not see day to day changes right away. Still, the owner of key AI hardware buying a major AI sharing platform could affect pricing, access, and competition over time.

Source: TechCrunch AI