Nvidia Buys Hugging Face for Record-Breaking $13 Billion

Hugging Face, an open-source AI platform founded in 2016 by three French entrepreneurs, has been acquired by Nvidia for $12.93 billion.

The company's co-founders, Thomas Wolf and Clément Delangue, said they did not anticipate the field growing so much when they started Hugging Face as a 'tiny team of scrappy underdogs.'

Nvidia's acquisition makes it clear that open-weight models are crucial for its future business. Hugging Face currently has 18 million individual users and 200,000 enterprise clients.

The deal also raises concerns about the potential influence on the open-source ecosystem, with some model creators worried that Nvidia's ownership will subtly favor its hardware.