The deal will see NVIDIA corner the market in both AI hardware and software.
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang has today announced NVIDIA is buying Hugging Face in a deal valued at $12.93 billion. It’s the confirmation of a rumor that’s been circulating for several weeks, with NVIDIA reportedly intensifying its interest in the company after other buyers became interested. Developers use Hugging Face to share, discover and test AI models. As the generative AI boom began in 2022, the platform established itself as a central hub for open-source models. Assuming the deal goes through, it puts NVIDIA in a dominant position for both AI hardware and open software.
Some analysts believe that open-source or open-weight AI will play an increasingly important role alongside proprietary frontier models from the OpenAIs, Anthropics and Googles of the world. Earlier this month, Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue said China was winning the AI race due to its embrace of open models.
NVIDIA was already an investor in Hugging Face, having participated in at least one funding round in 2023. Google, Amazon, Salesforce, AMD, Intel, IBM and Qualcomm were among the startup’s other investors.
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