The open-source AI world is about to lose its most neutral ground. The Information reported Wednesday that Nvidia has agreed to buy Hugging Face, the hub where developers share and download AI models, for $12.9B. Neither company has confirmed the report.
The acquisition would hand the chip giant control of the web’s busiest hub for open-source AI models, the platform developers use to share and download weights, datasets and tools. The Information puts Hugging Face’s revenue at roughly $150M a year, with the company close to profitability.
To see how far the price has climbed, consider 2023, when Hugging Face banked a $235M round at a $4.5B mark with Salesforce Ventures leading and Nvidia among the participants. Late last year it reportedly waved off a $500M Nvidia check that came with a $7B price tag, preferring to keep any single giant backer from steering its decisions.
Nvidia’s interest runs deeper than a prized asset. Major AI labs including OpenAI, Google and Amazon are building their own chips to reduce dependence on its hardware, and a thriving open-source ecosystem gives developers alternatives to those closed systems. Owning Hugging Face could also revive Nvidia’s scaled-back DGX Cloud ambitions and give it a channel to sell unused capacity from the billions of dollars in cloud commitments it has backed.
Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue has spent much of the year aligned with Nvidia’s open-source push, signing a letter alongside Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang that urged Washington to support open models.
