Nvidia Agrees to Acquire Hugging Face for $12.93 Billion to Strengthen Open-Source AI Ecosystem

Nvidia has officially agreed to purchase the artificial intelligence software platform Hugging Face for $12.93 billion. The acquisition marks the chipmaker's second-largest deal on record, following the purchase of assets from Groq. Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, stated that the goal is to provide Hugging Face with the resources to scale the open model ecosystem and community. He emphasized that Hugging Face will remain an open platform, allowing developers to choose their preferred models, frameworks, and computing platforms. Huang noted that Nvidia compute will not be required to build on or deploy through the platform. Clément Delangue, the CEO of Hugging Face, noted that the company approached Huang over the summer because Nvidia was a perfect home for the platform. Delangue attributed a recent hacking incident on Hugging Face to engineering mistakes and stated that the company used an Nvidia version of a Chinese open model to resolve the issue. The deal is intended to ensure that open-source AI models are optimized for Nvidia hardware. The acquisition follows a period of high demand for Nvidia's graphics processing units, which have powered the generative AI boom.

Sources

• abcnews.com
  Nvidia to spend $13 billion on Hugging Face, which will remain an open source platform
• CNBC
  Hugging Face approached Nvidia’s Huang weeks ahead of $12.9B acquisition, CEO tells CNBC
• Yahoo Finance
  Cramer Says Nvidia Spent $13 Billion to Make Sure You Never Buy a Rival’s Chip

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Paywall and unreadable sources

• The New York Times
  Nvidia Buys Hugging Face in $12.9 Billion Deal
• The Economist
  World in Brief: Nvidia buys Hugging Face; Iran warns against Israeli assault in Lebanon