Nvidia Acquires Hugging Face for $13 Billion to Boost Open Model Ecosystem
Nvidia has acquired Hugging Face for $12.93 billion in one of its largest deals to date, marking a significant shift in the company's focus beyond chip-making.
The deal gives Nvidia access to Hugging Face's open platform, which hosts over 3 million models, 500,000 datasets, and 1 million applications used by 18 million developers and researchers and over 200,000 companies.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang emphasized that Hugging Face will retain its brand, leadership, and neutrality, with no requirement for Nvidia's compute to be used on the platform.
The acquisition highlights the growing importance of open models in AI development, with Nvidia's resources aimed at addressing structural problems around storage, bandwidth, security scanning, and evaluation tooling.