Nvidia to acquire Hugging Face for $12.93b

SAN FRANCISCO - US chipmaker Nvidia has agreed to acquire artificial intelligence (AI) developer platform Hugging Face for about $12.93 billion, Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang announced Thursday.

Huang said in a company blog post that the two companies will work together to scale Hugging Face's platform, strengthen its infrastructure and expand access to AI for developers and institutions worldwide.

Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem, Huang said.

"NVIDIA compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face," Huang noted.

He added that Hugging Face will continue to support open-source and open-weight models from different model developers, as well as multi-cloud and multi-accelerator development and deployment.

According to Huang, more than 18 million developers, researchers and creators use Hugging Face, where they share more than 3 million models, 500,000 datasets and 1 million applications. More than 200,000 companies use the platform to discover, evaluate, customize and deploy AI.

Huang said Nvidia's infrastructure, engineering capabilities and global reach could help improve Hugging Face's platform reliability, safety, model evaluation, inference and deployment capabilities while preserving its open ecosystem.

Nvidia has also been expanding its involvement in open AI models. Huang said the company has released more than 500 models and more than 250 open datasets on Hugging Face, describing Nvidia as the platform's largest contributor of open models and data.

Hugging Face was founded by Clement Delangue, Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf.