Nvidia agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, acquiring a widely used open-source model repository and developer hub that hosts large libraries of models, datasets and community tools for open-source AI.
The deal routes a large portion of the purchase price to existing investors while folding Hugging Face’s platform and community into Nvidia’s software and infrastructure portfolio.
And the GPU giant will also absorb a sizable engineering and product team that brings a concentrated developer user base, more than 18 million developers, three million models and 500,000 datasets, and prior ties to Nvidia from earlier collaborations and funding rounds.
Keeping the door ajar
"We will keep Hugging Face an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem," Nvidia chief Jensen Huang said in a blog post, signalling the buyer's intent to preserve model choice and cross-cloud freedoms while accelerating platform scale USD 12.93 billion.
Hugging Face’s executives approached Nvidia weeks before the agreement, the company said, and Nvidia confirmed the acquisition after months of working together on tooling and robotics integrations.
Hugging Face investors will receive roughly $11.9 billion while there will be an equity retention for employees as part of the purchase consideration.
