After weeks of speculation, Nvidia has confirmed the acquisition of Hugging Face for $12.93 billion. The AI platform currently hosts three million models, one million applications and 500,000 datasets, with its services used by more than 18 million developers.
In a blog post, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said Hugging Face would continue supporting open-source and open-weight AI models while expanding access for developers.
“Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem. Developers will choose the models they want, the frameworks they want, the clouds and inference service providers they want and the computing platforms they want. Nvidia compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face,” said Huang.
Huang also highlighted Nvidia’s existing contribution to the platform, noting that the chipmaker has released more than 500 models and 250 open datasets on Hugging Face. He said the company develops open models to encourage adoption among developers around the world.
For Nvidia, which has established a dominant position in hardware for AI development and inference, owning an open ecosystem could provide significant strategic advantages. The company could help shape a platform optimised for its chips while also potentially selling unused computing capacity to enterprise customers through Hugging Face’s services.
Founded in 2016, Hugging Face has raised more than $395 million in funding, according to Crunchbase. Its most recent funding round took place in 2023, when the company raised $235 million in a round led by Salesforce Ventures, with Google, Amazon, IBM and Nvidia also participating.
In a post on X, Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue thanked the company’s community for demonstrating that its platform could provide an alternative to closed-source APIs.
“But for it to happen at [a] larger scale, it needs more compute, more support, more collaboration, and more visibility. That’s why we went to talk to Jensen, who offered to do exactly that with us,” said Delangue.
Hugging Face has continued to gain prominence as developers release increasing numbers of AI models on the platform. The company reportedly rejected a $500 million acquisition offer from Nvidia last year, according to the Financial Times. Last month, The Information reported that Hugging Face had reached $150 million in annualised revenue.
