The deal, announced Thursday, marks Nvidia’s second-largest acquisition after its $20 billion purchase of assets from AI chip startup Groq last year.
Hugging Face, founded in 2016 by French entrepreneurs Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf, has grown into a major platform for developers working with open AI models, datasets and applications. More than 18 million developers, researchers and creators use the platform, which hosts more than 3 million models, 500,000 datasets and 1 million applications, according to Nvidia.
More than 200,000 companies also use Hugging Face to discover, evaluate, customize and deploy AI technologies.
Deal follows talks initiated by Hugging Face
Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue told CNBC that his company approached Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang during the summer to discuss a potential deal.
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Delangue said the company had reached a point where open-source AI needed greater resources, scale and visibility. He also described Nvidia as a “perfect home” for Hugging Face.
Nvidia said it will pay about $11.9 billion to Hugging Face investors, while offering an equity-based retention program worth up to $1 billion for employees who join Nvidia.
Nvidia promises to keep Hugging Face open
The acquisition has raised questions about whether Nvidia could use its ownership of Hugging Face to favor its own hardware.
Huang sought to address those concerns, saying Hugging Face would remain an open platform and that developers would continue to be able to choose their preferred models, frameworks, cloud providers and computing platforms.
“NVIDIA compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face,” Huang said in a statement announcing the deal.
Hugging Face will also continue supporting open-source and open-weight models from different developers and maintain support for multiple cloud and accelerator platforms.
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Nvidia said it has already been a major contributor to Hugging Face, with more than 500 models and more than 250 open datasets published on the platform.
The acquisition gives Nvidia a much closer relationship with the developers and companies building AI applications, rather than limiting its role to supplying the processors that power them.
