NVIDIA has agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, bringing a major open AI platform under the chipmaker's ownership, as per NVIDIA reports.
The deal will allow NVIDIA to scale Hugging Face's platform, strengthen its infrastructure and expand access to AI for developers and institutions worldwide.
The acquisition deepens NVIDIA's push into open models beyond AI computing.
Hugging Face has become a major hub for the open model community over the past decade.
More than 18 million developers, researchers, and creators use the platform to share more than 3 million models, 500,000 datasets, and 1 million applications.
More than 200,000 companies use Hugging Face to discover, evaluate, customise and deploy AI.
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Hugging Face To Remain Open Platform
Despite the acquisition, NVIDIA said Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the AI ecosystem.
Developers will continue to choose their preferred models, frameworks, cloud providers, inference services and computing platforms.
NVIDIA computing will not be required to build or deploy AI through Hugging Face. It will continue supporting open source and open weight models from different builders.
Hugging Face will retain support for multi-cloud and multi-accelerator development. Developers can use the hardware and infrastructure that best suits their projects.
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NVIDIA Expands Open AI Push
NVIDIA said its infrastructure, engineering capabilities and global reach can help improve Hugging Face's platform reliability, safety, model evaluation, inference and deployment.
The chipmaker has already been a major contributor to Hugging Face. NVIDIA has released more than 500 models and over 250 open datasets on the platform.
The company said open models can widen access to AI by letting organisations build on existing capabilities instead of training models from scratch.
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang said the acquisition will give the Hugging Face team a larger platform to pursue its vision while retaining its iconic brand.
The deal comes as open weight models gain importance across the AI industry.
NVIDIA believes broader access to open models, tools and data can accelerate innovation and allow AI to reach more sectors globally, across the global technology landscape.
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