Nvidia is buying Hugging Face for $12.93 billion

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Nvidia announced on September 3rd that it will acquire Hugging Face, the platform used by more than 18 million developers to share and discover open AI models, datasets and applications, for roughly 12.93 billion dollars. The deal breaks down into about 11.9 billion dollars payable to Hugging Face shareholders plus up to 1 billion dollars in retention equity for employees joining Nvidia, and is expected to close in the first half of 2027 pending regulatory approval, making it Nvidia's second largest acquisition ever

Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue told CNBC he approached Jensen Huang over the summer, saying the two companies realized open source AI was at a turning point and needed more resources, scale and visibility. Nvidia has pledged Hugging Face will remain an open, neutral platform, continuing to support competing hardware from AMD and Intel, other cloud providers, and models from any developer, with no requirement to use Nvidia products to access or deploy through the platform. Nvidia is already the largest single contributor of open models and datasets to Hugging Face, having published more than 500 models and over 250 datasets of its own

The acquisition follows Nvidia launching its Open Secure AI Alliance last month, an initiative for companies to collaborate on identifying and patching security vulnerabilities across open AI infrastructure, with Hugging Face already a key collaborator on that project. Analysts described the deal as a strategic move to position Nvidia as a full AI platform rather than purely a chip supplier, with one investor noting Nvidia's roughly 200 billion dollars in expected free cash flow for fiscal 2027 makes a 13 billion dollar acquisition a relatively small bite. Curious what people think about Nvidia's pledge to keep the platform genuinely open and neutral, is that commitment credible long term, or does owning critical AI infrastructure inevitably create pressure to favor its own hardware eventually

NVIDIA is buying Hugging Face for $12.93 billion - Engadgetwww.engadget.com