Nvidia confirms it will buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion | TechCrunch

Nvidia has officially finalized an agreement to acquire the collaborative artificial intelligence platform Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, bringing to an end weeks of industry speculation.

Hugging Face serves as a central repository for the global technology community, hosting millions of machine learning models, custom applications, and datasets utilized by over eighteen million developers. Following the transition, Nvidia promises that Hugging Face will continue to operate as an open platform, meaning software creators will remain free to choose their preferred frameworks, cloud hosting providers, and processors without being restricted to Nvidia's hardware. This strategic move allows the semiconductor giant to cultivate a developer ecosystem optimized for its chips while offering a vehicle to bundle its surplus computing capacity for business clients.\n\nThis acquisition marks a major milestone for Hugging Face, which was established in 2016 and had previously raised hundreds of millions of dollars from major tech firms before rejecting a much smaller buyout offer from Nvidia last year. Executives from both companies highlighted that the merger will provide the vast computational power and scale required to position open-source AI as a viable competitor to proprietary, closed-source models. The transaction aligns with Nvidia’s aggressive investments in artificial intelligence infrastructure and model development, including multi-billion dollar partnerships with other startups. Nvidia's leadership has consistently championed open-weight models, arguing they are not only essential to driving hardware sales but also play a critical role in strengthening national cybersecurity infrastructure against emerging global threats.