Nvidia Pays $12.9 Billion for Control of Developer Choice in AI Models

Nvidia is reportedly paying $12.9 billion to acquire Hugging Face, a company that hosts over 2.96 million public model repositories.

The acquisition is seen as strategic for Nvidia, as it gains control of the layer where developers choose which models to run, effectively securing its position in the open-weights ecosystem.

Hugging Face's platform has experienced rapid growth over the past year, with a 23% increase in public model repositories and a 25% increase in hosted demo applications. However, the traffic on the platform is concentrated in a small number of families, with derivatives of Alibaba's Qwen models accounting for 151,448 repositories.

The acquisition price of $12.9 billion works out to roughly 86 times Hugging Face's annual revenue of $150 million. Nvidia's own quarterly revenue provides some context, with the company reporting $96.2 billion in revenue over the three months to July.