NVIDIA to acquire Hugging Face for $12.93B
NVIDIA has agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.93 billion to scale the open-source model repository's platform and infrastructure.
Stock photo for illustration only, not from the actual event
- NVIDIA agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $12.93 billion
- The platform will remain open without mandatory NVIDIA hardware requirements
- Over 18 million developers will retain full control over their tool choices
- Hugging Face will maintain its independent brand identity and operations
NVIDIA has announced a definitive agreement to acquire Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, aiming to scale the prominent open-source model repository's platform and infrastructure to meet growing demands.
The transaction focuses on driving platform growth and infrastructure investment, designed to expand artificial intelligence access for enterprise developers, software engineers, and research institutions worldwide.
Built over the past decade by Clem Delangue, Julien Chaumond, Thomas Wolf, and their engineering team, Hugging Face has established itself as the primary home for the open model developer community. Platform metrics highlight more than 18 million developers sharing over three million models, 500,000 datasets, and one million applications, alongside commercial adoption from over 200,000 companies.
“Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem. Developers will choose the models they want, the frameworks they want, the clouds and inference service providers they want, and the computing platforms they want.”
Jensen Huang
NVIDIA stated that Hugging Face will continue operating as an open platform for the entire AI sector. Developers will retain complete control over their choice of models, software frameworks, cloud providers, inference services, and computing hardware, with NVIDIA compute remaining entirely optional.
This nearly 13 billion dollar acquisition highlights NVIDIA's strategic expansion beyond hardware manufacturing into foundational software infrastructure and the open-source developer community. By preserving open access, the deal addresses industry concerns regarding the centralisation of AI development capabilities.
Stock photo for illustration only, not from the actual event
Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, referenced a recent open letter he co-authored regarding open weights, noting that such approaches democratize AI access and distribute technical leadership across companies and academic institutions without requiring baseline model training from scratch.
Julien Chaumond, co-founder and CEO of Hugging Face, commented that given Huang's staunch defense of open-source AI earlier in the summer, NVIDIA emerged as the ideal partner to ensure open-source technology serves as a foundational fabric for the future.
Source: AI News
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