Nvidia buys Hugging Face, the GitHub of AI, for $13 billion

“We will have to get through all the regulatory review. But we think overwhelmingly they’re going to see this as really a positive outcome,” said Justin Boitano, vice president of enterprise AI at Nvidia.

Nvidia pledged that Hugging Face “will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem,” with the more than 18 million developers who use the platform able to choose which models, cloud providers, and chips they use.

The platform, named for the “hugging face” emoji, hosts 3 million primarily “open” AI models, about 500,000 datasets, and 1 million AI applications. More than 200,000 companies use it to discover AI features, Nvidia said.

The proliferation of open-weight models would also create new channels of demand for Nvidia’s chip business, easing its reliance on a handful of customers, including OpenAI and Anthropic, who are also developing their own AI processors. Huang has thrown his company’s financial muscle behind groups developing open models, such as Reflection AI, and the infrastructure underpinning them, backing so-called neoclouds including CoreWeave and Nebius.

New York-based Hugging Face was recently at the center of a high-profile hacking incident when OpenAI models escaped human control during testing and broke into the platform.

The 10-year-old company, which has taken venture capital funding from Nvidia in the past alongside Google, Amazon, Intel, and others, makes money from premium subscriptions and enhanced services for corporate users. Nvidia plans to maintain the Hugging Face brand.

It turned down a $500 million investment from Nvidia late last year, in part to avoid having a single dominant investor, the FT reported.

Nvidia has recently stepped up its advocacy for open models amid a political tussle in the US over whether Chinese developers of increasingly advanced open systems should be sanctioned in relation to claims they have stolen technology from American labs.

Huang put his name to a letter in July calling for the US to support the open models. “AI leadership will be judged not by one frontier AI model, but by whether the United States builds a strong, open ecosystem that diffuses into every sector,” the letter said.

Additional reporting by George Hammond.

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