Nvidia Confirms Acquisition of Hugging Face for $12.9 Billion

Nvidia has officially confirmed the acquisition of Hugging Face for $12.93 billion. Hugging Face's platform is a cornerstone of the AI community, hosting three million models, one million applications used by over 18 million developers, and half a million datasets. In a blog post, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang stated that Hugging Face will continue to support open-source and open-weight models, remaining an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem. Huang emphasized that developers will maintain the freedom to choose their preferred models, frameworks, clouds, and inference service providers, noting that Nvidia compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face. Huang highlighted Nvidia's existing contributions, including the release of more than 500 models and 250 open datasets on the platform to encourage global developer adoption. For Nvidia, controlling an open ecosystem allows it to create a platform optimized for its chips and enables the company to sell unused compute capacity to enterprise customers packaged with Hugging Face’s offerings. Founded in 2016, Hugging Face has raised over $395 million to date. Its last funding round in 2023 raised $235 million, led by Salesforce Ventures with investments from Google, Amazon, IBM, and Nvidia. Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue stated that the acquisition provides the compute, support, and visibility necessary to scale as a viable alternative to closed-source APIs.