Nvidia has agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, bringing the influential open-source artificial intelligence platform under the control of the world’s biggest AI chipmaker.
Founded in 2016, Hugging Face provides developers with a shared online library for machine-learning models, datasets and software tools. Its community-driven approach has led to comparisons with GitHub, the platform widely used to host and collaborate on software projects.
The acquisition gives Nvidia a significant foothold in the infrastructure used to develop and distribute open-source AI. It also comes as leading closed-model companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, work to develop their own processors and reduce their reliance on Nvidia’s hardware.
Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive, said Hugging Face would continue to operate as an open platform after the deal.
“Together, we will scale Hugging Face’s platform, strengthen its infrastructure and expand access to AI for developers and institutions worldwide,” Mr 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.”
Reports of a possible sale emerged in August, when Business Insider said Hugging Face was working with a bank to explore a transaction worth about $13 billion. Days later, the publication reported that Nvidia had held acquisition discussions with the start-up, while The Information said the companies had already agreed a deal worth roughly $12.9 billion.
Hugging Face’s last official valuation was $4.5 billion, following a funding round in 2023 in which Nvidia took part. The Financial Times previously reported that the start-up had rejected a $500 million investment from Nvidia that would have valued it at $7 billion, apparently because of concerns about relying on one dominant investor.
The company’s financial performance is considerably smaller than the purchase price. The Information reported that Hugging Face was generating annualised revenue of about $150 million, underlining the strategic importance Nvidia appears to attach to its developer community, model library and role in the open-source AI ecosystem.
