AI Giant Nvidia to Buy Hugging Face for $12.9 Billion

Nvidia co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang is making a big new bet on an open-source AI future.

On Thursday, Huang announced that Nvidia, a major supplier of hardware to power AI applications, reached a deal to acquire Hugging Face — which operates a platform for building AI open-source models — for $12.93 billion. “Together, we will scale Hugging Face’s platform, strengthen its infrastructure and expand access to AI for developers and institutions worldwide,” Huang wrote in a blog post.

Hugging Face was founded in 2016 by French entrepreneurs Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf in New York City. More than 18 million developers, researchers and creators use Hugging Face to share more than 3 million models, 500,000 datasets and 1 million applications. More than 200,000 companies use the platform to discover, evaluate, customize and deploy AI, according to the company.

Hugging Face will “remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem,” Huang said. “Developers will choose the models they want, the frameworks they want, the clouds and inference service providers they want and the computing platforms they want.” He added that Nvidia systems will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face.

“Hugging Face will continue to support open source and open weight models from across the ecosystem, from every model builder. It will continue to support multi-cloud and multi-accelerator development and deployment, so builders can use the hardware and infrastructure that best fit their work,” Huang wrote.

Huang recently coauthored an open letter on the importance of open weights to the AI economy. “Joined by leaders from across the industry, we made a simple point: open weights broaden access to AI and help ensure that AI leadership is distributed across companies, institutions and communities,” he wrote.

“Open models let startups, businesses, universities and public institutions build on advanced capabilities without training every model from scratch. They enable organizations to match the right model to the right job. That is how AI can advance safely, strengthen cybersecurity and sovereignty, accelerate innovation, and reach factories, hospitals, farms, classrooms and Main Street businesses around the world,” Huang said. “AI advances faster when people can build together.”

To date, Nvidia has been the largest contributor of open models and data to Hugging Face. According to Huang, Nvidia has released more than 500 models on Hugging Face and more than 250 open datasets.

Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue told CNBC that his company approached Huang about a deal a few weeks ago. “During the summer, I think we realized that Hugging Face and open source AI in general was at the turning point, and that it needed more, more resources, more scale, more visibility,” he said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”