NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang announced this week that his company is acquiring Hugging Face in a deal valued at $12.93 billion. If regulators approve it, the purchase would position NVIDIA as the dominant force in both AI hardware and open-source AI software, according to a report by Engadget.
Hugging Face functions much like GitHub but is built specifically around artificial intelligence. It lets developers share, discover, and test open-source AI models. The platform has more than 18 million users sharing three million models, and more than 200,000 companies currently use those models in their businesses. The platform grew rapidly starting in 2022, when generative AI began its rise, and became a central gathering point for the open-source AI developer community.
Huang pledged that Hugging Face would remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem. He also said users would not be required to use NVIDIA products in their work on the platform. Huang pointed to a letter he recently published in support of open-source AI models, and noted that NVIDIA has already contributed more than 500 models and 250 open datasets to the Hugging Face platform.
NVIDIA was not a newcomer to Hugging Face before this deal. The chipmaker had already invested in the company during at least one funding round in 2023. Google, Amazon, Salesforce, AMD, Intel, IBM, and Qualcomm were also among the startup's investors.
Earlier this month, Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue said China was winning the AI race because of its embrace of open models. That comment came before the acquisition announcement. Some analysts believe open-source or open-weight AI will grow in importance alongside the proprietary frontier models built by companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.
The deal is pending regulatory approval.
