Nvidia announced plans Thursday to acquire artificial intelligence company Hugging Face for roughly $13 billion, as the chip company looks to spread “open” AI models globally.
While major industry players such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude operate on “closed” AI systems, Nvidia is seeking to expand the market for open models that users can freely download on their own servers and customize, among other features. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s deal to acquire Hugging Face marks a major development in his effort to expand the open model system, as the acquired company serves as a repository for millions of models and data sets.
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“Open models let startups, businesses, universities and public institutions build on advanced capabilities without training every model from scratch,” Huang said in a statement. “They enable organizations to match the right model to the right job. That is how AI can advance safely, strengthen cybersecurity and sovereignty, accelerate innovation, and reach factories, hospitals, farms, classrooms and Main Street businesses around the world.”
Nvidia has become the world’s most valuable company due to its status as the biggest designer of advanced chips powering and training AI models. With Nvidia’s acquisition of Hugging Face, one of its largest-ever deals, the chipmaker can continue to look beyond hardware. The deal comes after Hugging Face was the victim of an autonomous cyberattack carried out by hundreds of OpenAI models in July, a development that stoked concern about AI’s power to operate rationally without human direction.
Nvidia plans to maintain the Hugging Face brand and hopes to close the deal by 2027 if regulators readily approve the acquisition.
“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,” Justin Boitano, vice president of enterprise AI at Nvidia, told the Financial Times.
Hugging Face CEO Clement Delangue said Thursday that he reached out to Huang over the summer about a deal, “and a few weeks later, here we are.”
“During the summer, I think we realized that Hugging Face and open-source AI in general [were] at the turning point, and that it needed more, more resources, more scale, more visibility,” Delangue said during an interview on CNBC’s Squawk Box.
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Huang said he moved to acquire Hugging Face in part because over 18 million developers, researchers, and creators use the company to share more than 3 million models, 500,000 datasets, and 1 million applications. More than 200,000 companies use the platform to discover, evaluate, customize, and deploy AI, according to Huang.
“NVIDIA has been committed to open-weight models for years, demonstrated by multiyear investments and major contributions to open-source platforms, including Hugging Face,” he said. “NVIDIA has said that open models, data, and tools broaden access to AI, and it has contributed hundreds of open models and datasets to Hugging Face as part of that effort.”
