Nvidia buys Hugging Face for $12.9B

Nvidia purchases Hugging Face — a platform hosting hundreds of thousands of open AI models. In short: Github for neural networks. Developers around the world can upload/study/use these models for free. Nvidia paid $12.9B for Hugging Face. That’s ~80x the company’s $150M in annual revenue. Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue said the company was “close to profitability.”

Nvidia is buying Hugging Face because of a key reason: competitive pressure from closed-source AI labs. OpenAI and Anthropic are pushing to build their own chips so they aren’t reliant on Nvidia. By owning Hugging Face, Nvidia can directly tap into the largest open-source developer network for AI and lock in an important new growth category for their GPUs (open models).

Hugging Face has been a dominant player in the market for a decade. It’s been one of the last major independent platforms in the AI ecosystem. But now, the world’s biggest AI chip maker has acquired the central hub for the open-source AI community. The playing field has changed. Between open-source AI and closed-source AI, there’s a new player in the game: the world’s biggest GPU maker with a $12.9B bet.