Nvidia confirms $12.9B acquisition of AI hosting platform Hugging Face
SiliconANGLE Maria Deutscher ● Covered by 11 sources
Nvidia says it will buy Hugging Face for just over $12.93 billion. That puts the biggest AI chip buyer inside the main hangout for open models and datasets.
Based on reporting by SiliconANGLE, Maria Deutscher — read the original for the full story.
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Nvidia has confirmed it will buy Hugging Face for just over $12.93 billion, ending a week of rumors that had been circulating since reports of talks surfaced. CNBC said the talks started a few weeks ago. Business Insider later said sources had tipped it off, and then The Information reported the deal was done. Now Nvidia has said it out loud.
Hugging Face is not a chip company. It runs a GitHub-style service where researchers and developers share open-source AI models, plus the datasets and other technical pieces that go with them. Jensen Huang said in a blog post that the platform now hosts more than 500,000 datasets and four times as many models. That makes the company a useful map of what the AI crowd is actually building, not just what it is talking about.
That is probably the point. Hugging Face’s paid products exist, and its main revenue comes from cloud services for AI development teams, including private versions of its hosting platform and managed infrastructure for inference models. But the real prize looks like the software layer itself: the models people are using, the datasets they are pulling down, and the architectures gaining momentum before they become obvious to the rest of the market.
Forrester analyst Naveen Chhabra said Nvidia gets visibility into customer preferences and can spot what is trending weeks before it shows up in mainstream tech coverage. Huang also said Hugging Face will keep supporting projects that run across multiple chips and clouds, and that Nvidia will not force users to deploy workloads on its silicon. That is a smart line for an open platform owner, and a useful one for Nvidia too.
The acquisition is Nvidia’s second-largest startup deal after its $20 billion licensing agreement with Grok Inc. last year, according to the source. It also comes after Hugging Face had already drawn backing from AMD, Intel and Qualcomm in a recent funding round, with Salesforce also reportedly interested in buying it first. So this is not just a buyout. It is Nvidia planting a flag right in the middle of the place where AI developers already spend their time.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is Nvidia buying the part of AI that actually has a pulse: the software layer where developers leave footprints. That is cleaner than the usual hype about frontier models, and more dangerous too, because it gives Nvidia a better read on where the market is going before everyone else wakes up. Open platforms keep getting hoovered up by closed power, and somehow the industry still acts surprised when the bill arrives.
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