Nvidia Snaps Up Hugging Face for $12.9 Billion AI Push

Nvidia has made its second-biggest acquisition to date by buying AI developer platform Hugging Face for $12.9 billion (£9.5bn). The deal gives Nvidia access to a large community of AI developers and resources to expand its software offerings.

Hugging Face was founded in 2016 by French entrepreneurs Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf, initially as a chatbot app for teenagers. It later shifted focus to providing a platform for machine learning, offering building blocks for developers to create their own applications and share AI models.

Nvidia is a champion of open-weight models, which can be downloaded and modified by users. The company has released its own open-weight model, Nemotron 3.5 Lightning, and is reportedly working on an even larger model with 1 trillion parameters.