Nvidia Buys Hugging Face for $12.93 Billion

Nvidia has acquired Hugging Face for $12,930,300,000, making it a major player in the open-source AI platform market. The acquisition highlights Nvidia's growing commitment to open-source AI platforms and its desire to own where the world goes to get them.

Hugging Face is home to 3 million models, 18 million developers, and 200,000 enterprise customers, according to Jensen Huang on CNBC's Squawk Box. The company's founders, Clément Delangue, told that July's agent breach of Hugging Face's own infrastructure was the catalyst for the acquisition.

Nvidia's CEO, Jensen Huang, framed the acquisition as a way to grow in both directions - using closed models as much as possible and owning where the world gets open ones. Nvidia now owns the shelf where developers go to get models, regardless of who built them or where they come from.

The acquisition price is roughly 80 times Hugging Face's forward revenue, which some consider a high price. However, Nvidia's business model runs on both closed and open-source AI platforms, so it may be worth the investment.