Nvidia to acquire Hugging Face for $12.9 billion
Nvidia has announced an agreement to acquire Hugging Face, the AI model hub and open-source platform, for USD 12.93 billion.
Hugging Face hosts more than 3 million models, 500,000 datasets and 1 million applications, used by more than 18 million developers, researchers and creators. More than 200,000 companies use the platform to discover, evaluate, customise and deploy AI, according to a blog post from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.
Nvidia emphasised that Hugging Face will remain an open platform. Developers will be able to choose their models, frameworks, cloud providers and inference services freely – and Nvidia compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face. The platform will continue to support open-source and open-weight models from across the ecosystem, as well as multi-cloud and multi-accelerator development and deployment.
Nvidia describes itself as the largest contributor of open models and data to Hugging Face, having released more than 500 models and 250 open datasets on the platform.
"AI advances faster when people can build together," Huang wrote in the announcement.
