It’s official – Nvidia is buying Hugging Face for $12.9 billion
Nvidia is making another AI-focused acquisition
Following last week’s rumours, Nvidia has confirmed that it plans to acquire Hugging Face, the Open Model AI collaboration platform, for $12,930,300,000. The platform is currently used by millions for AI projects globally, and Nvidia’s acquisition will secure the company a foothold within the grassroots of open model AI developments.
Hugging Face is often called the “GitHub of AI” or GitHub for Machine Learning”. The company offers pre-trained models, datasets, and open-source libraries to developers to use. It also offers interactive demos that let users run and test AI models without specialised equipment. Following the acquisition, Nvidia plans to “help improve platform reliability, safety, model evaluation, inference and deployment capabilities”.
Nvidia says that Hugging Face will remain an open platform for AI. Developers will still be able to choose the models they want, their frameworks, and the clouds and inference services they wish to use. Models will not be locked to Nvidia hardware, and supporting Nvidia hardware will not be a requirement.
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. NVIDIA compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face.
Hugging Face will continue to support open source and open weight models from across the ecosystem, from every model builder. It will continue to support multi-cloud and multi-accelerator development and deployment, so builders can use the hardware and infrastructure that best fit their work.
– Nvidia
Nvidia is already one of Hugging Face’s largest contributors. That said, it remains unclear why Nvidia felt the need to acquire the company, or why Hugging Face wanted to be acquired in the first place. How does Nvidia plan to leverage Hugging Face to recoup its almost $13 billion investment? That remains unclear.
As the opportunity for open models accelerates, Hugging Face can serve the global AI community at unprecedented scale. NVIDIA’s infrastructure, engineering and global reach can help improve platform reliability, safety, model evaluation, inference and deployment capabilities, while preserving the open ecosystem that made Hugging Face foundational.
– Nvidia
Nvidia’s push for Open Model AI development
When Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang joined X in August, his first post focused on Open Model AI development and its benefits. For Nvidia, the clear benefit of Open Model AI is that it lessens the company’s reliance on OpenAI and Anthropic. If either OpenAI or Anthropic fails, it would be bad news for Nvidia. If Nvidia can grow the market share of open-model AI, it would reduce its reliance on OpenAI and Anthropic, which would be good news for Nvidia.
According to The Information, Hugging Face has reached $150 million in annualised revenue. This is up from the $100 million they reported months earlier. This places Nvidia’s $12.9 billion bid at around 85x Hugging Face’s earnings. Additionally, Hugging Face has recently stated on the TechCrunch Equity Podcast that the company is “close to profitability“. This suggests Nvidia’s potential acquisition is highly strategic. Why else would you spend that much money on a company that is merely “close to profitability”?
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