Nvidia will acquire artificial intelligence software platform Hugging Face for $12.93 billion (roughly €11.13 billion), the AI chipmaking giant announced on Thursday.
“Together, we will scale Hugging Face’s platform, strengthen its infrastructure and expand access to AI for developers and institutions worldwide,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in a post on the company’s website.
Hugging Face has over 18 million users who have created over 3 million models in over a million applications, according to Nvidia’s statement.
What is Hugging Face and why does its open model stand out?
Hugging Face was founded in 2016 by three French entrepreneurs in New York. The company describes itself as “the AI community building the future.”
It touts open models that can be downloaded and modified, in contrast to closed models such as rivals OpenAi or Anthropic.
“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,” Huang wrote when announcing the acquisition. “Nvidia compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face.”
Nvidia, best known for its GPUs, specialized chips originally designed to render gaming graphics at high speed, has released over 500 models on Hugging Face and more than 250 open datasets.
More companies and software developers have been turning to open models to keep costs down, as they tend to be cheaper than their closed rivals.
Hugging Face co-founder Clem Delangue said he, his two co-founders and the entire Hugging Face would remain on and join Nvidia as part of the new move.
“The goal really is to join Nvidia, to continue to run (an) independently neutral platform within the Nvidia team,” he told CNBC.
Hugging Face internal systems broken into by OpenAI
In July, OpenAI said two of its artificial intelligence models hacked into Hugging Face’s data processing systems, despite lack of authorization.
The incident fanned concerns that AI giants were incapable of controlling their own technology. Similar episodes were also reported by Anthropic and Moonshot AI.
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Edited by: Zac Crellin
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