Source : INDIA TODAY NEWS
If you remember those rumours about Nvidia acquiring Hugging Face for billions of dollars, well, they have turned out to be true. Nvidia has officially confirmed that it is acquiring Hugging Face, the wildly popular open-source AI platform, for $12.93 billion, marking one of the biggest deals in Nvidia’s history if it goes through necessary regulatory procedure.
Announcing the deal in a blog post, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang didn’t hold back his excitement. “I’m excited to announce that Nvidia has agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12,930,300,000,” he wrote, promising the company would “scale Hugging Face’s platform, strengthen its infrastructure and expand access to AI for developers and institutions worldwide.”
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Why is Nvidia buying Hugging Face?
For those unaware, Hugging Face is the internet’s go-to home for open-source AI. Founded back in 2016 by Clment Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf, the platform has quietly become the beating heart of the open-model ecosystem, hosting more than 3 million models, over 1 million applications, and half a million datasets, all used by more than 18 million developers and over 200,000 companies. That’s a lot of digital real estate for one company to now own outright.
Does buying Hugging Face mean Nvidia is about to lock everyone into its own chips? According to Huang, no. “Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem. 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,” Huang said.
On the Hugging Face side, CEO Clem Delangue took to X to explain the decision, framing it as a scaling-up moment. “But for it to happen at [a] larger scale, it needs more compute, more support, more collaboration, and more visibility. That’s why we went to talk to Jensen, who offered to do exactly that with us,” Delangue wrote.
Nvidia has been an early investor, joining Salesforce and Google in a $235 million funding round back in 2023 that valued Hugging Face at $4.5 billion. Nvidia later tried offering $500 million for a larger stake, which Hugging Face turned down, reportedly because it didn’t want a single investor powerful enough to sway its decisions. Fast forward to today, and that once-rejected valuation has nearly doubled, showing just how central Hugging Face has become to the broader AI world in a very short time.
Nvidia’s bigger bet on open models
This acquisition isn’t a random one-off either, it fits neatly into Nvidia’s long-running obsession with open-weight AI models. Huang pointed out that Nvidia has already released more than 500 models and 250 open datasets on Hugging Face, making it the platform’s largest single contributor. He’s also been publicly vocal about why open models matter, having co-authored an open letter arguing that open weights help distribute AI leadership across companies, institutions, and communities, rather than concentrating it in the hands of a few giants.
Part of a much bigger spending spree
This deal is really just the latest chapter in Nvidia’s aggressive push into AI infrastructure and open development. The company revealed during its recent earnings call that it has already poured over $50 billion into AI frontier labs. Just last month, it struck a $6 billion deal with coding startup Poolside to build open models together, and it’s previously spent close to $20 billion acquiring most of chip startup Groq.
As for Hugging Face itself, the company had reportedly been inching toward profitability, pulling in around $150 million in annualized revenue as of last month, according to The Information. With Nvidia’s backing now official, that growth curve is about to get a very serious push.
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SOURCE :- TIMES OF INDIA
