Nvidia’s Hugging Face deal is a bet on open models — and proof it’s no longer just a chip company
SiliconANGLE Zeus Kerravala ● Covered by 2 sources
Nvidia says it’s buying Hugging Face for $12.93 billion. That turns the open-model hub into a much bigger bet — and ties AI’s front door closer to Nvidia.
Based on reporting by SiliconANGLE, Zeus Kerravala — read the original for the full story.
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Nvidia is buying Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, and the company says the platform will keep its name, its leadership and its neutrality. Jensen Huang also said Hugging Face will stay open to the whole AI ecosystem, with Nvidia compute not required to build on it or deploy through it.
That matters because Hugging Face is not a side project. It sits at the center of open AI, with more than 3 million models, 500,000 datasets and 1 million applications on the platform. More than 18 million developers and researchers use it, along with more than 200,000 companies. For many teams, it is the place where an open-weight model gets evaluated, tuned, compressed and pushed into production.
The odd part is how small the business was relative to its role. Hugging Face was valued at $4.5 billion in its last disclosed round in 2023, and it’s estimated to have reached about $150 million in annualized revenue this year. That kind of revenue has to support storage, bandwidth, security scanning, provenance tracking, evaluation tools and inference endpoints. That’s a lot of infrastructure for a platform that has become the model registry for open AI.
Nvidia says the money will go into reliability, safety, evaluation, inference and deployment, which is basically the enterprise pain list in one sentence. The article’s point is that model quality is no longer the main bottleneck; everything around the model is. Open-weight systems are already good enough for many use cases. What slows adoption is the plumbing.
There’s also a strategic layer here. Nvidia has been pushing open weights for months, including an open letter Huang posted on X in July and more than 500 models and 250 open datasets on Hugging Face. The company doesn’t need one model to win. It needs many models to be trained, fine-tuned and served everywhere, which is a much better business than betting everything on a single closed API.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is Nvidia buying the place where the open-model crowd already lives, which is either brilliant or slightly unsettling depending on how much you enjoy centralization with a friendly logo. The pitch about openness is nice; the real test is whether competing hardware stays welcome once the checks clear. Open source has a long memory, and fork buttons are rude little guardians.
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