Nvidia Buys Hugging Face for $13 Billion, Plus 9 More Big M&A Deals of the Week
Trending Topics Ben Boissevain ● Covered by 15 sources
Nvidia agreed to buy Hugging Face for $13 billion. It’s a big bet on open AI, even after Hugging Face said no to Nvidia before.
Based on reporting by Trending Topics, Ben Boissevain — read the original for the full story.
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Nvidia is buying Hugging Face for $13 billion, a move that puts one of AI’s loudest champions of open models inside the world’s biggest chip company. That’s a striking turn for a company that only last year turned down Nvidia’s investment offer at a $7 billion valuation to stay independent.
Hugging Face has become the place where millions of models and datasets live. Its pitch has always been simple: open-weight models let users see the design, download them, change them, and run them on their own hardware. Nvidia says the deal is meant to speed that spread up, though it also gives the chip giant a much firmer hand on the rails under the AI boom.
Elsewhere in the week’s deal log, infrastructure keeps chasing AI demand. Vertiv agreed to buy UtilityInnovation Group for about $1.45 billion in cash, with up to $1.15 billion more tied to earnings targets, while SLB is spending $4.1 billion on Kelvion to push deeper into cooling and data center infrastructure. Both deals point to the same thing: the money is moving toward the plumbing.
The software side was busy too. CDW is paying about $525 million for Lovelytics, ServiceNow has picked up Sweep in a deal estimated in the hundreds of millions, and Palo Alto Networks bought Console for $500 million in cash and stock. Adobe also added Rilo, an India-based marketing intelligence startup, while Aquiline moved to take control of Flourish and Epiris agreed to take Gamma Communications private. It was a week of big checks and very little subtlety.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is what happens when a champion of open models becomes too useful to stay independent: the platform gets absorbed and the word ‘open’ gets a new corporate accent. Nvidia is playing a very smart game here, and everyone pretending this is just about access to models is missing the real prize — control of distribution. That’s the AI industry in one neat little joke: the open revolution, brought to you by a chip empire.
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