Nvidia Scoops Up Hugging Face for $12.9 Billion AI Play

Nvidia has acquired Hugging Face for $12.9 billion in a move that marks its entry into AI operating systems, rather than just foundational hardware.

The company plans to scale Hugging Face's open-source platform to expand access to open models for the developer community.

Huang said more than 200,000 companies use Hugging Face to deploy AI and under Nvidia's ownership it will remain an open platform for the AI ecosystem while continuing to support multicloud and multi-accelerator development and deployment.

Nvidia's acquisition of Hugging Face is its second-largest on record, following a $20 billion purchase of assets from chipmaker Groq in December.