Nvidia acquires Hugging Face for $12.93 billion

Nvidia is not buying an artificial intelligence model, but the platform that hosts millions of them. The chipmaker has reached an agreement to acquire Hugging Face for exactly $12.93 billion. This company founded by three French people has become one of the main places for publishing, sharing and deploying open AI models.

The operation is among the most important acquisitions in Nvidia's history. It should allow it to extend its influence beyond graphics processors, into the software tools used daily by developers and businesses.

Nvidia offers a central open AI infrastructure

Founded in 2016 by Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf, Hugging Face is often presented as the “GitHub of artificial intelligence”. Its platform allows developers to publish, test, modify and deploy models, but also to share datasets and applications.

According to Nvidia, Hugging Face has more than 18 million developers, researchers and creators. It hosts more than 3 million models, 500,000 datasets and a million applications. More than 200,000 companies use its services to evaluate or deploy artificial intelligence systems.

According to Reuters, Nvidia will pay approximately $11.9 billion to Hugging Face investors. A program of up to one billion dollars in shares must also be offered to employees who join the group.

The valuation marks a sharp increase from the last funding round in 2023, which valued Hugging Face at $4.5 billion. Nvidia was already one of its investors, alongside Amazon, Google, Salesforce, AMD, Intel and IBM.

Hugging Face promises to remain open to competitors

Nvidia says Hugging Face will retain its brand and continue to welcome models from across the industry. Developers will still be able to choose their frameworks, cloud providers, inference services and computing platforms.

Jensen Huang notably assures that Nvidia chips will not be mandatory to create or deploy models from Hugging Face. The platform must continue to support different hardware accelerators, including those offered by the group's competitors.

This promise constitutes a central point of the operation. Hugging Face has grown thanks to its neutrality and its ability to bring together projects from competing companies. Its passage under the control of the world's leading supplier of AI chips could raise questions about maintaining this balance.

For Nvidia, the acquisition strengthens its presence in software and open models. The group has already published more than 500 models and 250 datasets on Hugging Face. This positioning is gaining importance as several of its major customers, including Microsoft, Meta and Amazon, develop their own chips to reduce their dependence on its processors.