NVIDIA has agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, giving the artificial intelligence (AI) chipmaker control of one of the world’s largest platforms for sharing AI models, datasets, and applications.
The deal could expand NVIDIA’s reach beyond chips and computing systems by connecting it more closely with millions of AI developers and thousands of companies. Hugging Face is widely used to find, test, customize, and deploy AI models.
More than 18 million developers, researchers, and creators use Hugging Face. The platform hosts more than 3 million models, 500,000 datasets, and 1 million applications. It is also used by more than 200,000 companies.
“Together, we will scale Hugging Face’s platform, strengthen its infrastructure and expand access to AI for developers and institutions worldwide,” Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, said in a blog post.
Huang said Hugging Face would remain open to models, software tools, cloud providers, and computing systems from different companies. Developers will not be required to use NVIDIA chips or services when building or deploying AI through the platform.
“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. NVIDIA compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face.”
The commitment is important because NVIDIA competes with several chipmakers and cloud providers that also serve Hugging Face users. Keeping the platform open would allow developers to continue using hardware and services that best meet their technical needs and budgets.
Hugging Face will also continue supporting open-source and open-weight models from different AI developers. Open-weight models can be downloaded and modified, giving businesses, universities, government agencies, and startups more control over how they use AI.
NVIDIA is already the largest contributor of open models and data to Hugging Face, according to Huang. The company has released more than 500 models and 250 open datasets on the platform.
Huang said NVIDIA’s infrastructure, engineering resources, and global operations could improve Hugging Face’s reliability, security, model testing, and AI deployment services.
The acquisition strengthens NVIDIA’s influence across the AI industry, from the chips used to train models to the platform where developers find and deploy them. It also gives the company a larger role in the growing market for open AI models while promising to preserve the choices available to Hugging Face users.