Nvidia Acquires AI Development Hub Hugging Face in $12.9B Deal
In a $12.93 billion acquisition, Nvidia secures Hugging Face, a widely-used platform that serves over 18 million developers for sharing and deploying artificial intelligence models.
The semiconductor giant Nvidia has reached an agreement to purchase Hugging Face in a deal valued at $12.93 billion, marking a strategic expansion of the chipmaker's presence in the software tools that developers rely on for building and deploying artificial intelligence solutions.
As an open-source platform dedicated to AI development, Hugging Face provides a collaborative environment for sharing models, datasets and development resources. The platform serves a community of more than 18 million developers, researchers and creators who collectively share over 3 million models, 500,000 datasets and 1 million applications, according to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who made the announcement on Thursday.
"Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem," Huang said, emphasizing that developers will continue to have the freedom to select their preferred models, frameworks, cloud providers and computing platforms.
Huang clarified that Nvidia hardware will not be a mandatory requirement for building or deploying solutions through Hugging Face, he added. The company currently has more than 500 models and 250 open datasets published on the Hugging Face platform. Nvidia stated that Hugging Face will maintain its support for models from other developers along with multiple cloud and accelerator providers.
This acquisition follows approximately one month after Hugging Face revealed a security breach that involved an autonomous AI agent obtaining unauthorized access to internal datasets and service credentials. The organization reported that it discovered no evidence of tampering with public models, datasets or applications.