Nvidia agreed to acquire Hugging Face for roughly $12.93 billion, the companies confirmed Sept. 3, according to Nvidia's own announcement and TechCrunch.
Hugging Face hosts 3 million models, 500,000 datasets and 1 million applications used by more than 18 million developers, researchers and creators, and more than 200,000 companies actively use the platform, Nvidia said.
"Together, we will make AI more open, more capable and more accessible to people and institutions around the world," Huang said, according to Nvidia's blog post. Nvidia said Hugging Face will stay open to any hardware, cloud or framework: developers will keep choosing "the models they want, the frameworks they want, the clouds and inference service providers they want," without Nvidia compute being required, the company said.
Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue said the company needed "more compute, more support, more collaboration, and more visibility" to keep scaling, according to TechCrunch.
Hugging Face underpins a large share of the open-source AI stack that builders outside the big labs actually use. A single hardware vendor now owns the model hub much of that stack depends on, and Nvidia's promise of neutrality is a claim to watch over time, not one to assume holds.