Nvidia has confirmed its acquisition of AI platform Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, ending weeks of speculation about the deal.
Hugging Face’s platform hosts 3 million models, 1 million applications and 500,000 datasets, serving more than 18 million developers. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the platform will remain open to open-source and open-weight models, with developers free to choose their preferred models, frameworks, cloud providers and computing platforms.
According to Huang, Nvidia compute will not be required to build or deploy through Hugging Face. Nvidia has contributed more than 500 models and 250 open datasets to the platform.
Founded in 2016, Hugging Face has raised more than $395 million, including a $235 million round in 2023 led by Salesforce Ventures, with participation from Google, Amazon, IBM and Nvidia, according to Crunchbase.
Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue said the company pursued the deal to gain more compute, support, collaboration and visibility while scaling its open platform. The Information previously reported that Hugging Face was generating $150 million in annualized revenue, while Delangue said in July that the company was nearing profitability.
Source: TechCrunch
