Nvidia buys Hugging Face for 12.93 billion dollars, a year after being turned down
Nvidia's own announcement puts the price at 12.93 billion dollars and commits to keeping Hugging Face open to the whole AI ecosystem, with no Nvidia-compute requirement for developers. TechCrunch reports the deal follows a 500 million dollar offer Hugging Face rejected last year, according to the Financial Times, with the company now citing 150 million dollars in annualized revenue and its chief executive saying the platform needed more compute and support to keep growing.
Artificial Intelligence··Evening
Nvidia confirms the deal Hugging Face once said no to
Nvidia's blog post, signed by chief executive Jensen Huang, sets the price at 12.93 billion dollars and states that Hugging Face will keep supporting open-source and open-weight models while developers keep choosing their own frameworks, clouds and inference providers, with no closing timetable or regulatory-review detail given. TechCrunch reports the agreement follows a 500 million dollar offer Hugging Face rejected last year, according to the Financial Times, and that Hugging Face is now citing 150 million dollars in annualized revenue. Hugging Face chief executive Clem Delangue told his community that the platform needed more compute, support, collaboration and visibility to keep growing at scale, and that he approached Huang directly for it.[1], [2]
Nvidia counts 18 million developers already on the platform
Nvidia's own figures put Hugging Face at more than 18 million developers, researchers and creators, more than 3 million models, 500,000 datasets and 1 million applications, with more than 200,000 companies discovering and deploying models there. Nvidia says it has itself published more than 500 models and more than 250 open datasets on the platform, and that Nvidia compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face.[1]
Huang ties open models to Nvidia's cybersecurity pitch
TechCrunch reports Huang told analysts frontier models are vital to cybersecurity, letting defenders run large, continuously operating autonomous systems that proprietary models alone could not support, and that Nvidia's own open model helped Hugging Face defend against a cyberattack after proprietary models failed to protect the platform. The outlet notes the acquisition follows a 6 billion dollar deal with coding startup Poolside reported last month plus more than 50 billion dollars Nvidia says it has put into AI frontier labs.[2]
