Nvidia has officially confirmed its acquisition of Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, according to announcements from both companies on Thursday. The deal, which had been rumored for weeks according to TechCrunch, represents a significant investment in open-source AI infrastructure.
According to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s blog post, Hugging Face’s platform currently hosts more than 3 million models, 1 million applications, and 500,000 datasets, used by over 18 million developers. More than 200,000 companies use the platform, according to the Nvidia announcement.
In his statement, Huang emphasized that “Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem” and that “Nvidia compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face.” He added that “open models let startups, businesses, universities and public institutions build on advanced capabilities without training every model from scratch,” as reported by Wired.
According to TechCrunch, Hugging Face was founded in 2016 and has raised over $395 million in funding, with its last round in 2023 raising $235 million led by Salesforce Ventures, including investments from Google, Amazon, IBM, and Nvidia.
According to Wired, the acquisition positions Nvidia more deeply in the software side of AI development, beyond its dominant hardware position. The move follows Nvidia’s recent efforts to rally support for open-weight AI models, including organizing more than 80 companies to sign an open letter to the US government defending such models.