- Nvidia pays $11.9 billion for Hugging Face, and a further $1 billion in equity-based retention
- The company promises to keep Hugging Face “an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem”
- Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has publicly supported open weight models
Nvidia has confirmed plans to acquire Hugging Face for $12.9 billion subject to regulatory approval, marking a major expansion for the chipmaker as it snaps up one of the most important AI model distribution platforms.
In a post, the company asserted it plans to keep Hugging Face as it is: “Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem,” CEO Jensen Huang wrote.
Huang explained Nvidia’s “infrastructure, engineering and global reach” will help improve Hugging Face’s “reliability, safety, model evaluation, inference and deployment capabilities.”
Nvidia confirms Hugging Face acquisition
The platform currently counts more than 18 million developers, researchers and creators as users, with more than three million models shared on it.
“Hugging Face will continue to support open source and open weight models from across the ecosystem, from every model builder,” Huang stressed again, noting his public backing for open weight models. Ordinarily in an acquisition, questions would be raised over whether, in this instance, Nvidia’s own GPUs and software could receive preferential treatment, but the company is doing everything it can to assure us that won’t be the case. A pending regulatory investigation will also ascertain this.
Nvidia also claims to be the biggest contributor to Hugging Face, having shared more than 500+ models and around half as many open datasets.
The news comes less than two weeks after reports started to circulate about a potential acquisition, and if it closes, it’ll be Nvidia’s biggest acquisition to date. The $12.9 billion payout comprises a Hugging Face valuation of $11.9 billion (way above its earlier $4.5 billion valuation in 2023) and an equity-based retention program of around $1 billion.
As for upcoming regulatory interjection, Nvidia warned in a SEC filing that “Government restrictions may negatively impact our business and the Hugging Face platform.”
