Nvidia Scoops Up Hugging Face in $12.9 Billion AI Push

Nvidia has agreed to buy Hugging Face for approximately $12.9 billion, making it one of the largest AI developer communities under its control.

The acquisition includes about $11.9 billion for Hugging Face shareholders and up to another $1 billion in equity incentives for employees who join Nvidia.

Nvidia already dominates AI computing hardware, but by acquiring Hugging Face, it moves closer to the developers deciding which models get downloaded, tested, fine-tuned, and deployed on that computing infrastructure.

According to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, developers will continue choosing their own models, frameworks, cloud providers, inference services, and computing platforms, with Nvidia's hardware not being required for building or deploying through Hugging Face.