Nvidia (see details) Acquires Hugging Face (discover more) for $12.93 Billion
Nvidia is acquiring Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, confirming a deal that had been rumored for the past week. The chipmaker will acquire the platform where many open-source AI developers store and share their models, while promising to maintain its openness.
Jensen Huang, NVIDIA’s Founder, President, and CEO, emphasized in a LinkedIn post that:
"Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem."
He assured developers of their freedom to choose models, frameworks, cloud providers, and computing platforms.
This acquisition is notable for several reasons:
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Hugging Face, valued at 86 times its $150 million annual revenue, has raised a significant amount of funding since its founding ten years ago.
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The scale of the deal is unprecedented for Nvidia, surpassing their previous record of $6.9 billion acquired for Mellanox in 2019.
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Hugging Face hosts three million models, a million applications, and half a million datasets, making it a go-to starting point for developers using open AI models.
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Hugging Face’s community-driven nature, neutrality across different accelerators and cloud providers, and significant resource needs were factors in the acquisition.
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The deal raises questions about Nvidia’s intentions with such a valuable platform, given their dominance in the AI hardware space.
Despite these questions, Hugging Face will retain its brand, leadership, and community-driven focus, with co-founder Clement Delangue and his team staying on.