Nvidia bags Hugging Face, AI models play leapfrog and CrowdStrike doubles down on AI
SiliconANGLE Robert Hof ● Covered by 13 sources
Nvidia is buying Hugging Face, and it’s betting big on open AI models. That gives it more reach than a chip sale ever could, while the AI race keeps sprinting.
Based on reporting by SiliconANGLE, Robert Hof — read the original for the full story.
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Nvidia’s latest move is a loud one: it’s buying Hugging Face, the open AI model archive, for $12.9 billion. The deal had been rumored for more than a week, so the surprise wasn’t the target. It was the price, which starts to look less wild when the buyer is Nvidia and the company says it pulled in $24 billion in cash flow last quarter alone.
Hugging Face matters because it sits at the front door of open-source models. Developers use those models to build applications, and to make them run well on specific AI chips. That makes the deal more than a vanity purchase. It gives Nvidia a deeper grip on the part of the market where models, tools and hardware all meet.
Jensen Huang has said Nvidia won’t favor its own chips, but the logic of the deal points in a clear direction anyway. As analyst Zeus Kerravala put it, a busy ecosystem of specialized models can create more total compute demand than a small set of closed APIs. It also gives Nvidia a hedge if Meta Platforms, OpenAI or Microsoft decide to lean harder into building their own accelerators.
The timing is no accident. Google, Meta, Anthropic, OpenAI and World Labs all shipped new model versions this week, and the whole field kept doing what it does best: leapfrogging itself. That scramble is now pulling security firms into the same orbit. At Fal.Con in Las Vegas, CrowdStrike doubled down on AI and launched its own security frontier models. CEO George Kurtz’s pitch was blunt: the AI control plane is the next big frontier for cybersecurity.
Elsewhere, SoftBank’s AI infrastructure unit is heading to market with zero revenue, which is exactly the sort of thing that keeps bubble talk alive. Google also got a legal win, with a court ruling it doesn’t have to sell off its ad business that places ads on other websites. And VMware, still standing inside Broadcom, rolled out VMware Private AI Cloud to give enterprises more control over their AI stacks.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the part where open AI stops being the cheerful counterculture and becomes a distribution weapon. Nvidia understands that better than most: own the rails, not just the chips, and the cash register follows. The rest of the market can keep pretending models are the whole story; hardware vendors know better.
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