Nvidia has agreed to acquire popular code repository Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, extending the chipmaker’s reach into the open-model ecosystem.
The transaction includes about $11.9 billion for Hugging Face investors and an equity-based retention program of as much as $1 billion for employees joining Nvidia, Reuters reported. Hugging Face was valued at $4.5 billion in its last disclosed funding round in 2023.
Hugging Face operates a widely used platform where developers and companies find, test, customize and deploy AI models, datasets and applications. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the platform has more than 18 million users and hosts more than 3 million models, 500,000 datasets and 1 million applications.
Huang said Hugging Face would remain open to models, cloud providers and computing platforms across the industry. “Nvidia compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face,” he wrote in a company blog post.
The pledge addresses a potential conflict created by the acquisition: Nvidia would own a central distribution platform for open models while selling the processors used to train and run many of them. Some developers and analysts told Reuters they remained concerned that Nvidia could eventually give its own technology an advantage over competing hardware.
The purchase also broadens Nvidia beyond chips as several of its largest customers, including Meta, Microsoft and OpenAI, develop processors of their own. Nvidia had more than $22 billion in cash at the end of July, according to Reuters.