Nvidia has agreed to acquire artificial intelligence platform Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, bringing one of the world’s largest repositories of open AI models, datasets and applications into the chipmaker’s business.
The deal, announced on September 3, is one of Nvidia’s largest acquisitions and expands its presence beyond AI computing hardware into the developer platform used to build and deploy AI systems.
Deal Covers Investors, Employees
Under the transaction, Nvidia will pay about $11.9 billion to Hugging Face investors, while a separate equity-based retention programme worth up to $1 billion will be offered to employees who join Nvidia.
Nvidia did not disclose a completed closing date in its September 3 announcement. The transaction remains subject to the applicable closing conditions and approvals.
The acquisition follows Nvidia’s earlier investment in Hugging Face. The New York-based company raised $235 million in 2023, valuing it at $4.5 billion. Nvidia participated in that funding round alongside investors including Salesforce, Google and Amazon.
TechCrunch, citing Crunchbase, reported that Hugging Face had raised more than $395 million in funding before the acquisition announcement.
Hugging Face’s Platform Scale
Hugging Face has become a major platform for the development and distribution of open AI models.
Nvidia said more than 18 million developers, researchers and creators use the platform, which hosts more than 3 million models, 500,000 datasets and 1 million applications. More than 200,000 companies use Hugging Face to discover, evaluate, customise and deploy AI.
The platform was founded in 2016 by Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf. It provides access to models and datasets as well as software tools and services used to develop AI applications.
Nvidia has already built a significant presence on the platform. The company says it has released more than 500 models and 250 open datasets on Hugging Face.
Open Platform Commitment
Nvidia said Hugging Face will continue operating as an open platform for the wider AI ecosystem following the acquisition.
Jensen Huang said developers will continue to be able to select the models, frameworks, cloud providers, inference services and computing platforms they prefer. Nvidia also said its own computing hardware will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face.
The company further committed to supporting open-source and open-weight models from across the ecosystem and to maintaining multi-cloud and multi-accelerator development and deployment.
That commitment is significant because Hugging Face hosts models and tools used across different parts of the AI industry, rather than being tied exclusively to Nvidia’s hardware.
Nvidia Expands AI Footprint
The acquisition gives Nvidia a closer connection to the developers and organisations using open AI models. Reuters reported that the deal could help Nvidia build a pipeline of customers using its processors to run AI services.
Nvidia is also facing increasing efforts by major technology companies to develop alternative AI chips. Reuters reported that Meta, OpenAI and Microsoft are among companies developing their own AI chips, potentially reducing their reliance on Nvidia.
For Hugging Face, Nvidia’s resources are expected to support expansion of the platform. Huang said Nvidia’s infrastructure, engineering and global reach could help improve platform reliability, safety, model evaluation, inference and deployment capabilities while preserving its open ecosystem.
The companies already work together to help developers use Nvidia computing services on Hugging Face.
The acquisition therefore brings together Nvidia’s AI computing business and a platform used by millions of people and more than 200,000 companies to develop and deploy AI. The immediate commitment from Nvidia is that Hugging Face will remain open to models, infrastructure and hardware across the broader AI ecosystem.
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