NVIDIA to acquire Hugging Face for $12.93 billion

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang has announced that the company is acquiring Hugging Face in a deal valued at $12.93 billion. The announcement confirms rumors that had been circulating for several weeks, with reports suggesting NVIDIA's interest intensified after other potential buyers began showing interest in the startup.

Developers use Hugging Face to share, discover and test AI models. Since the generative AI boom began in 2022, the platform has established itself as a central hub for open-source models.

Consolidating hardware and software power

Should the deal close, it would place NVIDIA in a dominant position across both AI hardware and open-source software. Some analysts believe open-source, or open-weight, AI models will play an increasingly important role alongside proprietary frontier models from companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Google.

Earlier this month, Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue said China was winning the AI race thanks to its embrace of open models.

NVIDIA was already an investor in Hugging Face, having taken part in at least one funding round in 2023. Other investors in the startup have included Google, Amazon, Salesforce, AMD, Intel, IBM and Qualcomm. This is a developing story and further details may emerge.