NVIDIA's significant acquisition of AI startup Hugging Face for USD 12.9 billion is set to revolutionise open source AI development, expanding access and capabilities for developers and institutions globally.
Key Points
- NVIDIA has acquired AI startup Hugging Face for USD 12.9 billion to enhance its AI capabilities.
- The acquisition aims to scale Hugging Face's platform, strengthen infrastructure, and expand global access to AI for developers.
- Hugging Face will remain an open platform, supporting various models, frameworks, and computing platforms without requiring NVIDIA compute.
- The deal reinforces NVIDIA's commitment to open source and open weight models, fostering innovation across the AI ecosystem.
- This strategic move is expected to make AI more open, capable, and accessible to institutions and individuals worldwide.
Technology giant NVIDIA on Thursday said it has acquired AI startup Hugging Face for USD 12.9 billion. The New York-based Hugging Face was founded in 2016 by the French entrepreneurs Clement Delangue, Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf.
NVIDIA chief Jensen Huang said in a blog post that NVIDIA has agreed to acquire Hugging Face for USD 12,93 billion, an acquisition through which it will scale Hugging Face's platform, strengthen its infrastructure and expand access to AI for developers and institutions worldwide.
Expanding AI Accessibility And Open Source
Describing Hugging Face as a "vibrant home for the open model developer community," Huang said that more than 18 million developers, researchers and creators use Hugging Face 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, customise and deploy AI.
"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," Huang said.
NVIDIA's Vision For Open AI Development
Hugging Face will also continue to support open source and open weight models from across the ecosystem, from every model builder.
"Open models let startups, businesses, universities and public institutions build on advanced capabilities without training every model from scratch. They enable organisations 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," Huang said, adding that "AI advances faster when people can build together."
Huang said that together with Hugging Face, the company "will make AI more open, more capable and more accessible to people and institutions around the world."
