Nvidia has agreed to acquire Hugging Face, the leading open-source artificial intelligence platform, for $12.9 billion in a deal that signals the chipmaker’s continued push beyond hardware and deeper into the rapidly expanding AI ecosystem.
Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue told CNBC that the company approached Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang during the summer after recognising that open-source AI had reached a critical turning point.
“We realized that Hugging Face and open-source AI in general was at the turning point,” Delangue said, explaining that the company needed greater resources, scale and visibility. He added that Nvidia represented a “perfect home” for the platform and that negotiations progressed quickly, with a deal reached just weeks after the initial approach.
Open Platform at the Centre of the Deal
Despite the acquisition, Hugging Face is expected to remain an open platform serving developers, researchers and institutions across the broader AI industry.
Huang said the acquisition would enable Nvidia to expand Hugging Face’s infrastructure, strengthen its platform and broaden access to AI technologies worldwide. He also reiterated that the platform would remain open to the wider AI ecosystem.
The move gives Nvidia a stronger position across the AI technology stack, extending its influence from the processors that power AI systems to the software, models and developer tools built on top of them.
Nvidia’s Second-Largest Acquisition
The $12.9 billion transaction will rank as Nvidia’s second-largest acquisition on record. It follows the company’s approximately $20 billion purchase of assets from AI chipmaker Groq in December.
Before the Groq transaction, Nvidia’s largest deal was its nearly $7 billion acquisition of Israeli semiconductor company Mellanox in 2019.
Nvidia has emerged as the world’s most valuable company amid extraordinary demand for its graphics processing units, which have become a critical foundation of the generative AI boom.
A Broader AI Strategy
The Hugging Face acquisition highlights Nvidia’s ambition to evolve from a leading chipmaker into a broader AI technology powerhouse. Hugging Face has become a major hub for open-source AI models, tools and developer collaboration, making it a strategically important addition to Nvidia’s expanding portfolio.
The deal also comes shortly after Hugging Face faced a significant hacking incident that raised fresh concerns around cybersecurity and the growing sophistication of AI tools.
With the acquisition, Nvidia is positioning itself to play an even larger role in shaping the infrastructure and software ecosystem that will underpin the next phase of artificial intelligence.
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