Nvidia acquires Hugging Face in US$12.9 billion mega deal

CEO Jensen Huang said the team at Hugging Face have built something "remarkable”.

Chip giant Nvidia has confirmed that it will be buying AI developer platform Hugging Face for US12.9 billion.

Announced via a blog post, Jensen Huang, CEO at Nvidia said, “Together, we will scale Hugging Face’s platform, strengthen its infrastructure and expand access to AI for developers and institutions worldwide.”

Huang has promised to keep the AI open source platform 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,” he noted.

Huang praised the French trio of Clem Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf and the team at Hugging Face for building “something remarkable”

He said they built, “A vibrant home for the open model developer community.”

Via a LinkedIn post, CEO and co-founder Delangue said he is “super happy” to join forces with Nvidia.

“Thanks to the community, we’ve shown that it can be a complement, and even an alternative, to closed-source APIs,” he said.

“But for it to happen at larger scale, it needs more compute, more support, more collaboration and more visibility. That’s why we went to talk to Jensen [Huang], who offered to do exactly that with us.”

According to Delangue, all staff are staying and there will be no changes to the Hugging Face team.

Hugging Face rose to notoriety earlier this year after OpenAI admitted that two of its frontier models were responsible for compromising the Hugging Face platform.

Launched 10 years ago, Hugging Face is used by reportedly 18 million developers, researchers and creators.

CRN Australia has reached out to Hugging Face for a comment.