Nvidia to buy open-source AI platform Hugging Face for $12.9B

Nvidia announced on September 3 that it has agreed to buy the open-source AI platform Hugging Face for $12.9303 billion (about 87.092 billion yuan). Hugging Face is an important home for the open model developer community, with over 18 million developers, researchers, and creators sharing more than 3 million models, 500,000 datasets, and 1 million apps. Over 200,000 companies use it to find, evaluate, customize, and deploy AI.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said Nvidia is the largest contributor of open models and data to Hugging Face, having published over 500 models and 250 open datasets. After the acquisition, Nvidia will use its infrastructure, engineering capabilities, and global reach to expand Hugging Face's open AI platform. Huang promised that Hugging Face will remain open, continuing to support various open-source and open-weight models, multi-cloud, and multi-accelerator environments.

Open-weight models let startups, companies, universities, and public institutions use advanced AI without training from scratch, spreading AI leadership across more organizations. Open models help organizations pick the right model for different tasks and speed up AI adoption in real-world settings like factories, hospitals, farms, classrooms, and small businesses. Huang stressed that Nvidia will improve Hugging Face's reliability, security, model evaluation, inference, and deployment, but won't turn it into a closed gateway for Nvidia hardware only.