“Hugging Face will remain an open platform”: Nvidia strikes $12.9B deal for the ‘GitHub of AI’
The New Stack Paul Sawers ● Covered by 11 sources
Nvidia is buying Hugging Face for $12.9B and says it won’t lock the site to Nvidia chips. That’s the big test: can the “GitHub of AI” stay neutral once the chip giant owns it?
Based on reporting by The New Stack, Paul Sawers — read the original for the full story.
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Nvidia has agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, putting one of the AI world’s most important open-model hubs under the control of the company that already dominates the chip side of the business. The deal is still subject to regulatory approval, but the message from Nvidia is clear: this is supposed to be an acquisition without a platform squeeze.
That reassurance matters because Hugging Face’s value has always come from being a neutral place. Developers use it to find and deploy open models across Nvidia, AMD, Intel and cloud hardware. If that sounds fragile under single-company ownership, that’s because it is. Nvidia knows it, and Jensen Huang is trying to get ahead of the suspicion.
In the announcement, Huang says Hugging Face will stay open to the whole AI ecosystem, keep supporting multiple clouds and accelerators, and not require Nvidia compute to build on or deploy through it. He repeats the point enough times that the word “open” shows up 19 times in the note. That’s not subtle. It’s a company trying to talk itself out of a trust problem before the paperwork is even done.
Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue is making the same case from the other side. He says open-source AI is at an inflection point after 10 years, and that bigger scale now needs more compute, support, collaboration and visibility. He says Nvidia has promised to keep the platform open, independent and compute-agnostic, with the founders and existing team staying on.
There’s a reason people are comparing this to Microsoft’s $7.5 billion GitHub deal in 2018, even if the analogy only goes so far. GitHub never had to stay neutral across rival chips. Hugging Face does, and Nvidia’s own filing points to the tension by naming support for other silicon vendors and warning that future open-source rules could raise compliance costs. The headline price is also oddly exact: $12,930,300,000, with $11.9 billion going to stockholders and up to $1 billion reserved for retention awards.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the kind of deal that sounds reassuring right up until the owning company has a reason to stop being reassuring. Open platforms are easy to love when they’re small and useful; they get much harder to protect once a trillion-dollar supply chain notices them. Nvidia is promising neutrality because it has to, which is exactly why nobody should treat the promise as a victory lap.
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