NVIDIA has agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, with CEO Jensen Huang announcing the deal in a blog post today. NVIDIA says that Hugging Face is to remain an independent company and, more importantly, an open platform. This means that there will be no hardware restrictions for users and they can continue to build or deploy through the platform regardless of whether they use NVIDIA hardware or not.
Hugging Face was founded in 2016 as a chatbot company and, from 2021, evolved gradually into a main point for the AI community. Currently, is hosting over 3 million models, 500,000 datasets, and 1 million applications. These are used by more than 18 million developers, researchers, and creators, while over 200,000 companies use the platform to discover, evaluate, and deploy.
NVIDIA is already the platform's largest contributor of open models and data, with more than 500 models and 250 open datasets published there. Hugging Face co-founder and CEO Clément Delangue said on X that the company approached NVIDIA because scaling further requires more compute, support, and infrastructure. "For it to happen at larger scale, it needs more compute, more support, more collaboration and more visibility," Delangue wrote on X, adding that NVIDIA committed to keeping the platform open, independent, and compute-agnostic.
Both sides outlined that multi-cloud and multi-accelerator support will continue, and that model builders from across the ecosystem, not just those using NVIDIA hardware, will keep being supported.
