Nvidia has confirmed it will acquire US-based AI company Hugging Face for a price of just over $12.93bn.
The deal was announced in a blog post by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. The AI chip maker will take ownership of a platform that hosts more than three million AI models, one million applications, and over 500,000 datasets used by a developer community exceeding 18 million people.
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Hugging Face, founded in 2016, has established itself as a widely-used resource for researchers and developers to access and share open-source AI models and datasets.
Its platform allows users to contribute and download pre-trained AI models for a range of tasks, such as text generation, speech-to-text, and text-to-speech.
More than 200,000 companies are reported by Nvidia to use the platform for discovering, customising, and deploying AI.
Huang said: “Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem. Developers will choose the models they want, the frameworks they want, the clouds and inference service providers they want and the computing platforms they want. Nvidia compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face.”
He emphasised that the platform will continue supporting open-source and open-weight models “from every model builder” and maintain support for development and deployment across multiple clouds and hardware accelerators.
In the post, Huang highlighted Nvidia’s contributions, stating, “Nvidia has released more than 500 models on Hugging Face and more than 250 open datasets.”
He described Nvidia as the largest contributor of open models and data on the platform.
Hugging Face’s most recent funding round took place in 2023, when it raised $235m led by Salesforce Ventures.
Other investors in that round included Google, Amazon, IBM, and Nvidia itself.
The platform operates a system similar to GitHub for open-source AI, offering free and paid services for accessing models and running inference workloads.
Under Nvidia’s ownership, the infrastructure and scale are expected to expand, with Nvidia stating they aim to “scale Hugging Face’s platform, strengthen its infrastructure and expand access to AI for developers and institutions worldwide.”
Earlier this month, Nvidia and MediaTek disclosed plans to broaden their ongoing collaboration to create future AI computing platforms.
