Nvidia confirms it will buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion

After weeks of swirling rumors, Nvidia confirmed contiguous that it has acquired Hugging Face for $12.93 billion. Hugging Face’s level hosts 3 cardinal models, 1 cardinal applications utilized by implicit 18 cardinal developers, and fractional a cardinal datasets.

In a blog post, Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang said that Hugging Face volition proceed to enactment open-source and open-weight models and volition enactment connected expanding developer access.

“Hugging Face volition stay an unfastened level for the full AI ecosystem. Developers volition take the models they want, the frameworks they want, the clouds and inference work providers they privation and the computing platforms they want. Nvidia compute volition not beryllium required to physique connected oregon deploy done Hugging Face,” said Huang.

Huang touted Nvidia’s contributions and said that the spot institution has released much than 500 models and 250 unfastened datasets connected Hugging Face. He argued that the institution builds unfastened models to get developers crossed the satellite to usage them.

For a institution similar Nvidia, which is simply a ascendant hardware level for AI improvement and inference, an unfastened ecosystem that it controls is beneficial arsenic it tin make a level suited for its chips. Plus, arsenic TechCrunch wrote earlier, Nvidia volition beryllium capable to sell its unused capacity to endeavor customers packaged with Hugging Face’s offering.

Hugging Face was founded successful 2016 and has raised implicit $395 cardinal successful backing to date, according to Crunchbase. The company’s past circular was successful 2023, when it raised $235 million led by Salesforce Ventures, with investments from Google, Amazon, IBM, and Nvidia.

In a station connected X, Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue thanked the assemblage for showing the institution could beryllium an alternate to closed-source APIs.

“But for it to hap astatine [a] larger scale, it needs much compute, much support, much collaboration, and much visibility. That’s wherefore we went to speech to Jensen, who offered to bash precisely that with us,” said Delangue.

Hugging Face has risen successful prominence, with much models being released each day. Last year, the institution rejected a $500 cardinal woody from Nvidia, according to the Financial Times. Last month, The Information reported that Hugging Face is clocking $150 cardinal successful annualized revenue.

In an interrogation with TechCrunch successful July, Delangue said that its growth complaint is helping the level to get “close to profitability.”